Must Apple be number one at everything it does? Does being number two — or three for that matter — mean the company has somehow failed? Hardly. With record revenue and profits, it certainly doesn’t seem that the company is confronting potential failure at every turn. But it’s not always the market leader. Take the […]

At one time, tech pundits wondered what company should buy Apple, and it’s true that, in the 1990s before Steve Jobs returned, that was not beyond the realm of possibility. In early 1996, Apple evidently negotiated with Sun Microsystems — do you remember them? — to sell itself. This came in the wake of the […]

It wasn’t terribly pleasant for Alphabet (Google) and Microsoft stockholders this past week. Both companies missed revenue targets, more or less, and thus suffered from lower stock prices. For Google, it’s pretty much the same old problem. Most of its revenue comes from one product, search, and, to a lesser extent, Google Play, Android’s app […]

Last week, Apple announced that some eleven million people had signed up for the 90-day free trial of Apple Music. Depending on your point of view and expectations, that was either good, or not-so-good, for the fledgling subscription music service. Apple treated the news as something significant, that 1.4% of the estimated 800 million iTunes […]