Nearly a year ago, Microsoft made an unsolicited $44 billion bid to buy Yahoo. No good came of it: Yahoo’s executives, who appeared chronically allergic to any move that might reward shareholders, wasted a precious year fending off Microsoft rather than finding a way to beat their chief corporate rival, Google.
It’s too late to sell your Apple stock. If you sold it yesterday, you are a genius. But today? You’ll be the biggest loser. Why? Apple has the best team, the best distribution, the best supply chain, the best management in the business. Everyone, from Palm to Microsoft to Google wants to be like Apple. Hint: They can’t.
The bears on Palm continue to cave after a furious rally in the stock following the company’s announcement of its “new newness,” the Palm Web OS and the Palm Pre handset.
Yesterday, the stock was upgraded by former Palm bears at Citigroup and Deutsche Bank. This morning, UBS analyst Maynard Um made a similar move. “The Palm Pre generated significant buzz at CES, surprised us to the upside and breathed new life into Palm’s stagnant portfolio,” he wrote in a research note. “Though the company still has challenges ahead, it’s clear the winds now appear to have shifted in its favor.”
Analysts at Avian Securities and Morgan Keegan downgraded Palm stock this morning, prompting a sharp downturn in shares. Reasoning includes the conjecture that smartphone sales will be down for the next few quarters. This is certainly true for the Palm Centro, and the Treo Pro and Treo 800w may not even make it to AT&T and Verizon stores in time for the holiday season. Early demand for the BlackBerry Bold, however, appears to be “robust.”
You have to search pretty hard to find tech stocks left out of today’s rally. But they’re out there. Here are a half-dozen companies that were not included in today’s historic rally, which took the Nasdaq Composite up nearly 12 percent.
Unless you’re Google, these look like rough times to launch a mobile operating system. That puts Palm in an awkward position. Things have not been going well for the beleaguered smartphone maker, whose founders arguably kick-started the smartphone revolution 12 years ago.
Palm (PALM) shares received a boost this morning from Cowen analyst Matthew Hoffman, who launched coverage of the company with an Outperform rating. Hoffman asserts that the stock can appreciate more than 30 percent over the next 12 months.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been staying up late glued to my screen. No, not watching the Olympics or the nonstop political gabfest on 24/7 news channels. I have been obsessively logging in to iTunes. It’s not about the songs, audio books, TV shows or movies. It’s all about the apps.
If anyone knows how best to survive a corporate near-death experience, it is Jon Rubinstein. In 1997 the former Hewlett-Packard engineer was asked by Apple’s founder, Steven P. Jobs, to lead the hardware engineering division at the company, which was then struggling. Apple was wallowing in financial losses and the Mac’s appeal was waning. Mr. [...]
This weekend in San Francisco, the second annual iPhoneDevCamp 2 is underway. Whereas the first confab focused primarily on Web applications, this one has a definite native application flavor, thanks in large part to the fact that the iPhone software development kit (SDK) is out of beta and now available for developers.
When the iPhone was released in June, many developers were disappointed by the absence of an SDK for writing third-party applications on day one.
Could Palm (PALM) post an upside surprise in its fiscal first quarter ended August?
RBC Capital’s Mike Abramsky raises that possibility in a research note this morning. Abramsky notes that in the company’s 10-K filed on Friday, Palm disclosed a Q4 backlog of $238 million, up from $185 million one year earlier, and $121 million two years earlier.
In the mobile phone business, the big news this week is Friday’s arrival of Apple’s (AAPL) 3G iPhone. But Palm (PALM) apparently has some ideas on how to take advantage of the extra traffic the new iPhone will generate in AT&T (T) stores.
Trouble in the mobile phone business continues to mount.
Following up on disappointing results this week from both Research In Motion (RIMM) and Palm (PALM), Sony Ericsson (SNE, ERIC) this morning said that sales and pre-tax net income in the second quarter would “continue to be negatively affected by moderating demand of mid-to-high end mobile phone,” [...]
Deutsche Bank’s Jonathan Goldberg advises against holding a short position in Palm (PALM) heading into the company’s earnings report and conference call after the close on Thursday. Goldberg is no bull on the stock; he maintains a Sell rating on the shares and a $4 price target.
PALM, the stock, is not doing so hot. Palm, the company is having its own issues, as are Palm the devices. In the past, the saving grace in all this was that the customer support was very good and decent. So the question is whether tech support (or other forms of horrible customer interactions) could be the straw that breaks Palm’s back.
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