Rip Ragged

Okay, kiddies, here’s your lesson in Business 101.

Apple is a business. All the punditbots in the echosphere can’t change the basic fact: What Apple is doing works as compared against the only metric that matters: Did it make more money today than it did yesterday. The answer in Apple’s case is, once again, yes.

A few things that don’t count as business metrics:

Some developers aren’t getting a guidebook to the App Store acceptance procedure.

OS X isn’t open source enough.

Apple isn’t providing software support for every cobbled-together crapware mp3 player that wants to sync with iTunes.

Microsoft has new ads.

Apple Fanbois are arrogant assholes just because their company makes superior products.

Steve Jobs went to the doctor.

Steve Jobs didn’t bring a note from home.

Steve Jobs ate breakfast and failed to alert Forbes.

The release date of Windows 7.

Let’s break down the numbers for Apple’s quarter that ended in June, shall we?

Revenue: Kicked Ass

Sales: Kicked Ass

Profit: Kicked Ass

Overall success: Frigging awesome.

What the pundits at BusinessWeak, Forbes, Fortune, Barrons, and the Wall Street Journal have been doing forever is picking apart Apple’s strategy and criticizing it based on their own opinions of what would work better.

Of course, none of them have a criticism to give that’s worth a quarter pound of beef byproducts. That’s because not a single one of them runs a company with $25B in the bank and no debt.

What they should be doing is trying to find out what Apple is doing that works so they can try to explain to other companies how to emulate it. But that would require research and thinking. They aren’t into that.

The only columnist at any publication with the chops to criticize Apple is Jack Welch. I’ll bet if Jack took on the topic, he’d analyze what Apple is doing right and use it as an example to others. There wouldn’t be much in the way of criticism. I’ll bet the rest of my fried okra and half a sandwich Steve Jobs would be interested in reading that report – especially if there was advice. I know I would.

…

Nokia has another iPhone killer. It’s perfect except it isn’t a phone, and nobody has really heard of it. It’s Ovi. It’s Finnish for “door.” As near as I’ve been able to ascertain, the hinges are rusty and the knob is iffy.

It has some apps, some music, some technical glitches, and you need an N97 to use it. They’re $600.

It’s compost.

…

And then a song.