Not bad for one of the hardest quarters for quite some years—recession at home and abroad, the Switch ad campaign only just starting in the States and not having reached other territories yet. Apple announced a net profit of $32 million, or $.09 per diluted share, for the quarter. These results compare to a net profit of $61 million, or $.17 per diluted share, a year ago. Revenues for the quarter were $1.43 billion, down 3% from a year ago, and gross margins were 27.4%, down from 29.4% a year ago. International sales accounted for 42% of the quarter’s revenues.
      Apple could do a lot better though given the high quality of their current range of products and their very competitive prices. The facts about Macs need to better distributed than they are. Ignorance and myth is still rife.
However, Apple CFO Fred Anderson said in his financial report conference call that Apple’s channel partners and (US-only) retail stores are reporting lots of Windows users coming into the stores wanting to switch to the Mac platform.

[Source: The Gainesville Sun]
$5.1 million in interest-free Federal loans made the purchases possible. Pity that some school districts are buying Dells as well as Macs, though. I guarantee the kids in these mixed computer schools will gravitate towards the iMacs in preference to the Windows machines.
      Kids aren’t stoopid. They know what works right and what doesn’t.

It has been a long, long time since Windows-using geeks could slag off Macs as “only good enough for those arty types” with any degree of justification, however slight. Back then, hard-core programmers stuck to their Windows machines like flies.
     
Then Linux came along and the real geeks flocked to it instead of an operating system that was a toy by comparison. When Mac OS X appeared, and showed that Apple had outdone the Linux geeks by making a Unix far better than their Unix, the more aware real geeks began migrating to the Mac.
     
Now, with Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2), and all the new software tools that come with it that are dead easy to use but that have been created with some incredibly cutting-edge programming underneath, the Mac has proven that it really is the computer for the geeks and normal people too.
     
Here is a quote from a Wired story on this subject:
“There’s an interesting thing happening at Macworld this year. Apple is visibly morphing into a ‘geekier than Microsoft’ computer company.
     
Apple is now the biggest supplier of Unix-based operating systems in the world—‘bigger than Sun, bigger than Linux’—Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced during his Macworld keynote speech on Wednesday.”
     
Now it is crystal clear—If you want to be a real geek, forget about Windows and Linux. Get a Mac.

Web services have been all the talk of the high tech industry for ages, and Microsoft’s .NET was supposed to be the Web services platform. But .NET is still vapourware—wind, hot air and empty speculation with nothing to show for it yet.
      Of course UserLand Radio did it all before anyone else. Apple released its Web services lat night, named .Mac. And now Amazon has got into the Web services game.
     
Here is an example of using Amazon’s Web services—a light version of Amazon.com search, by an independent developer.

Here are some web services applications people have already built using the Amazon Web Services API. Here are my three favourites so far:

Build an Online Store with PHP

One Click Search & Display

Book Watch Plus

Having tried vainly and unsuccessfully to work with a former McKinsey consultant at one of Australia’s largest finance companies, I was very interested to come across this New Yorker article on Enron and McKinsey and their cult of talent.
      Weblogger Jonathan Delacour comments on the piece in today’s entry.
     
The ex-McKinseyite I had the misfortune to try to work with was arrogant, an egomaniac, worshipped by her co-workers, and desperately and deeply ignorant. She was eventually promoted sideways and then left the firm. The best of luck to whoever had the misery of hiring her next.

Michael Gerber informs us in his bestselling book on small business, The E-Myth that you don’t have to nor should you need to rely on specific talented individuals to ensure business success, but instead should create business systems that anyone of any degree of native talent can enter and excel in.
      Systems, not Talents.

Weblogger and web standards expert Dave Winer can be forgiven for feeling a little fragile right, while he is convalescing from his recent heart surgery. But he might want to re-engage his brain just a bit.
      The evidence? Winer has just commented on Paolo Valdemarin commenting on Windows-to-Mac and Mac-to-Windows switchers, whom both webloggers are referring to as immigrants.
      Paolo is suggesting that those few Windows-to-Mac switchers who did it during the era before Steve Jobs came back to run the company he co-founded, when Apple was being run into the ground by bad managers, should seriously consider switching back to Mac now that Apple is innovating so powerfully once again. Paolo’s case is easily supported by Apple’s new computers and operating system.
      Winer switched from Mac to Windows for a number of reasons, one of them to do with software he created not being accepted by Apple management. Having tried to use that product, Frontier, as a scripting environment I understand why Apple passed on it and opted for its own AppleScript as the Mac’s native scripting language. Frontier is great, but you have to be a fully committed nerd to even begin to get to grips with it. That just was not me. I can and have made good use of AppleScript however.
     
“I resigned as a Mac user, not over Amelio, as Paolo says, but over the religion. I like using a computer just as a computer,” Winer says. In all my years using computers of all types—Mac, Linux, Unix, Windows and Amiga— I have never come across any hint of ‘religion’ amongst the members of the Macintosh-using community in the UK, the US and Australia.
     
On the other hand, I have encountered very large numbers of Linux and Windows users who have a cultish devotion to their operating system of choice and the figureheads of those movements attached to them, and still do. One comes across dedicated Windows users every day whose devotion to their OS, their machines, and Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer is remarkable in its intensity, despite all the shortcomings and failings in each the same users complain of.
     
I have only ever heard devotees like these characterise Mac users as religious. I don’t know any Mac users who are cultish in any way. I know many Windows users who exhibit all the symptoms. Who is calling whom names?
      I chose to make Apple’s computers my main production machines, after an unemotional, non-religious comparison of each competing platform. The Apple Mac and its OS won hands down for allowing me to concentrate on working with computers, instead of having to constantly work on them in order to make them work each day. Macs simply work.
     
That is a fact that at least 25 million Mac users know and are glad to share. Every Mac user I know has Macs in order to do things. They didn’t choose Macs in order to tinker with machines and operating systems. We’d rather get stuff done, the kind of stuff that earns money every day.
     
We don’t have time for crackpot computer religions, cults of personality or pretending to be backyard computer mechanics.

Winer goes on to say “Apple could have kept me, if they had embraced the standards of the Web. Instead they tried to get the Web to balkanize over QuickTime, Cyberdog and OpenDoc. Yuck. I went with the mainstream. Apple’s proposition was more slavery, the Web offered an enticing freedom, for a while, until Microsoft killed Netscape. Oh well. It’s too much trouble to learn a new OS now. Why bother.”
      Poor old Dave. It is worthwhile commenting on him and his statements as he is such a powerful force in the weblog world and amongst the so-called digerati, and what he says is taken very seriously by surprisingly many people. On the other hand he does have a reputation for being an occasional whinger and whiner.
     
OpenDoc and Cyberdog were great technologies Apple developed as alternatives to the usual way of doing things, as alternatives that worked better.
      Apple did not force them down anyone’s throats. When users and developers did not adopt Cyberdog and OpenDoc in sufficient numbers, Apple ceased their development. Apple has never been against standards in any way, shape or form. Mac OS X has excellent, even superlative, support for the Web, for standards and especially open standards, and Apple has a history of such support. There was no balkanization nor slavery.
     
QuickTime is an excellent media layer, player and file format for multimedia, as 100,000,000 mainstream Mac and Windows users have discovered. Slavery, schavery. Balkanization, schmalkanization. Is this really 100,000,000 balkanized and enslaved people, Dave?
      In conclusion, Dave Winer is being just a little bit over-emotional right now. And that is his right, given what he has been through lately. He just needs to disengage his emotions, and re-engage his brain.
      If he bothers to take a clear and unemotional look at Mac OS X running on that old Apple G4 Cube that he has stashed away, then he will conclude that it is easy to use, not a problem to learn, expecially for an old Unix guy like him, and certainly does not enslave nor balkanize anyone.

I have been burning the candle at both ends for several days here in Perth, trying to make a significant dent in a web design project for a Melbourne client and a Sydney advertising agency.
      First the start of the job was delayed, then it was going to be coming much later, then it suddenly arrived at the worst of all possible times. I worked until 3AM this morning, then uploaded it all to the server in the United States for the client and my agency contact to view it at the start of their working days.
      They are both pleased enough with it, luckily, and now I must take a break to get some even more urgent and important things out of the way next. I am exhausted.