Apple beats estimates; credits iPhone sales

Apple reported fiscal fourth quarter earnings of $1.14 billion, or $1.26 per share, on revenue of $7.9 billion, beating Wall Street estimates of $1.11 per share on $8.05 billion in revenue. (statement) The company credited the strong quarter partly on iPhone sales - “We sold more phones than RIM,” CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement, about Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry.

Still, investors are looking ahead at the holiday season, asking if a new line of iPods and a refresh of the MacBook line can counter the global economic slump and uncertain consumer confidence. The company provided a wide range for its guidance, putting revenue at $9 billion to $10 billion and earnings per share to $1.06 to $1.35. In a statement, company CFO Peter Oppenheimer said, “Looking ahead, visibility is low and forecasting is challenging, and as a result we are going to be prudent in predicting the December quarter.”

In the same quarter last year, Apple reported earnings of $904 million, or $1.01 per share, on revenue of $6.22 billion. Gross margins were 34.7 percent, up from 33.6 percent for the same quarter last year.

CEO Steve Jobs made a rare appearance on the conference call and addressed the folks on the call with his take on the success of the iPhone, growth of the App Store and his general thoughts on the downturn. “We are not economists,” Jobs said, noting that the company also isn’t sure of the impact of the bumpy economic conditions. “We read the same newspapers you do.”
Other highlights from the quarter:

- The company sold 6.9 million iPhones, taking the company passed its goal of 10 million sold for 2008 - with two months left in the year. The company said iPhone is now 39 percent of the total business.
- Apple shipped 2.61 million Mac computers, a 21 percent increase over the year-ago quarter. It set a company record for a single quarter.
- More than 11 million iPods were sold, up eight percent from a year ago. The company said it was record for a non-holiday quarter. It’s market share for portable music players remained above the 70 percent mark.
- The iTunes store has more than 65 million active accounts and a catalog of 8.5 million titles. It has just added more television shows, renewed its content deal with NBC and added high-def programming.
- The company has $25 billion in cash and zero debt. In a call with analysts, Jobs hinted that the financial position gives the company the “ability to invest our way through this downturn.”
- The iPhone App store expects to see its 200 millionth application downloaded by tomorrow, 102 days since the July launch.

Shares of Apple were down 7 percent in regular trading, closing at $91.49. The stock mostly recovered in after-hours trading, jumping to more than 7 percent in active trading.

NOTE: Resource taken from ZDNet.

Gartner ITxpo 2008: The top 10 IT products

This article was co-authored by Bill Detwiler, TechRepublic’s Head Technology Editor.

Over 100 IT vendors did their dog-and-pony show for the 2008 ITxpo at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando on October 13-16. TechRepublic scoured the show floor and came up with our list of top 10 most important products.

Gartner Symposium ITxpo is now one of the largest and most influential trade shows in the IT industry due to its focus on IT decision-makers, Gartner’s popular thought leadership sessions such as its list of the top 10 technologies to watch over the next three years, and its keynotes from top technology executives such as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Cisco CEO John Chambers.

On the show floor, Bill Detwiler and I looked at nearly every one of the vendors in order to find the solutions with the most potential to impact businesses and IT departments. We put a special emphasis on products that were new within the last couple months or are scheduled to be released within the next couple months. In a few cases, the most interesting products were not new, per se, but were new to us and not as well known across the industry.

See Top 10 IT products: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=10502&tag=nl.e539 .

NOTE: Source taken from ZDNet

OK, now OpenOffice is definitely good enough

There is a reason that the OpenOffice.org 3.0 servers are struggling to keep up with demand. OO.org 3.0 really is a serious upgrade over version 2.4 and makes NeoOffice irrelevant for Mac OS X users (previously, OpenOffice only worked within X11; While NeoOffice did a great job porting OO.org to native OS X, OO.org 3.0 works out of the box in OS X as a native Aqua application).

Last week I asked if OpenOffice was good enough. The general consensus? OO.org is good enough to start a flame war, but we’re not really sure if it’s good enough to be a serious competitor to MS Office.

Now that OO.org 3.0 is out, I’m having a much tougher time seeing both sides of the issue here (I actually like Office 2007/2008, by the way; I think they’re slick, well-polished, and highly functional). I had never liked the OpenOffice equation editor; this version brings a very nice graphical and text-based hybrid editor to us math teachers. Mail merge was clunky in OO.org; this version brings a mail merge wizard and improved label templates. Outline numbering tended to be a bit kludgy for notetaking in OO; this version improves the stability and interface of outlining.

Annotations are now incredibly easy to add (Insert, Note) and Office 2007/2008 formats are supported across the board. While Microsoft has dumped VBA support in Office 2008, OO.org users can run Visual Basic scripting, as well as Python and Javascript.

I’m not actually bashing MS Office here. It’s a great suite and they still have something that OpenOffice lacks: Publisher. However, Publisher was lacking on the Mac platform anyway and *nix users haven’t had access to MS Office (including Publisher) without some serious Wine work. Speaking of Access, OpenOffice continues to bring a solid database offering to all platforms. Is it as powerful as Access? I don’t think so (let’s face it - Access 2007 rocks). However, Mac, *nix, and Windows users can all interchange databases and use OO.org Base as a front end to a variety of data sources (including MySQL).

OpenOffice.org is not a clone of Office 2007 (good call, Sun). It’s a full-featured suite that gives us everything we need from MS Office and the world of productivity software while keeping the bottom line quite a bit more reasonable (you don’t get any more reasonable than free).

Yes, OO.org has been good enough for a long time; the latest release should leave little doubt for any users who had been on the fence.

NOTE: Resource taken from ZDNet

Why QA is important?

Quality assurance, or QA for short, refers to planned and systematic production processes that provide confidence in a product's suitability for its intended purpose. It is a set of activities intended to ensure that products (goods and/or services) satisfy customer requirements in a systematic, reliable fashion. QA cannot absolutely guarantee the production of quality products, unfortunately, but makes this more likely.

Two key principles characterise QA: "fit for purpose" (the product should be suitable for the intended purpose) and "right first time" (mistakes should be eliminated). QA includes regulation of the quality of raw materials, assemblies, products and components; services related to production; and management, production and inspection processes.

It is important to realize also that quality is determined by the intended users, clients or customers, not by society in general: it is not the same as 'expensive' or 'high quality'. Even lowly bottom-of-the-range goods can be considered quality items if they meet a market need.

Total quality control

Deep analysis of QA practices and premisses used about them is the most necessary inspection control of all in cases where, despite statistical quality control techniques or quality improvements implemented, sales decrease.

The major problem which leads to a decrease in sales was that the specifications did not include the most important factor, “What the specifications have to state in order to satisfy the customer requirements?”.

The major characteristics, ignored during the search to improve manufacture and overall business performance were:

• Reliability
• Maintainability
• Safety
• Strength

As the most important factor had been ignored, a few refinements had to be introduced:

1. Marketing had to carry out their work properly and define the customer’s specifications.
2. Specifications had to be defined to conform to these requirements.
3. Conformance to specifications i.e. drawings, standards and other relevant documents, were introduced during manufacturing, planning and control.
4. Management had to confirm all operators are equal to the work imposed on them and holidays, celebrations and disputes did not affect any of the quality levels.
5. Inspections and tests were carried out, and all components and materials, bought in or otherwise, conformed to the specifications, and the measuring equipment was accurate, this is the responsibility of the QA/QC department.
6. Any complaints received from the customers were satisfactorily dealt with in a timely manner.
7. Feedback from the user/customer is used to review designs.
8. Consistent data recording and assessment and documentation integrity.
9. Product and/or process change management and notification.

If the specification does not reflect the true quality requirements, the product's quality cannot be guaranteed. For instance, the parameters for a pressure vessel should cover not only the material and dimensions but operating, environmental, safety, reliability and maintainability requirements.

NOTE: Source taking from Wikipedia