Technology

By Rick Bookstaber Medical care is famously immune to the usual market incentives; the patient has little reason to make a cost-benefit tradeoff. Doctors and hospitals hardly do either; indeed the opposite seems to be the case. Matters are…

I am a macro guy and so I usually discount the importance of single events when thinking about the bigger picture. That said, this is a momentous decision and a stunning defeat for Samsung. And it should be clear that Samsung was copying…

I told you a week ago why I was switching from a PC to a Mac. So I have made the switch and I am one week into my return to the Mac. So far, I'm pretty happy. No Blue screens of death anymore! To be honest with you, the first few days were…

By Rick Bookstaber There is a recent story in the New York Times on the growing use of labor-saving robots to increase production efficiency and, by replacing low-cost overseas labor, to return production to our shores. But the operative…

The fact that earnings are declining at US companies should not be a surprise given the decline I reported in earnings on the national income and product accounts for Q1. But now reported earnings are showing year-on-year declines for the…

Last weekend, I got that familiar blue screen of death on my PC laptop, you know that blue screen with a bunch of cryptic lines of words on it that tells you your computer just crashed and everything you were working on was for naught. I…

I want to concentrate on the popped Web 2.0 bubble in the wake of Groupon's earnings and subsequent share price slide. Web 2.0 is for real. I know that may be a strange way to start a post on Groupon and the Web 2.0 IPO bubble but it's…

The Wired Interview with Samsung's Chief Product Officer Kevin Packingham is a good jumping off point for understanding the patent wars between Apple and Android. Steve Jobs famously saw Android as a rip off that he was going to try to…

The story on Apple's margins is even more interesting when you look at how high its iPhone margins are. Analysts have calculated that the gross margins on the iPhone are nearly twice the margin on the iPad. And this suggests that Apple…

Apple is in a market share/margin quandary that was inevitable, Steve Jobs or not.