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Apple Said to Acquire Color

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Re: Apple Said to Acquire Color

#111

Post by wilfra »

zizee wrote: post #103
aresant wrote: post #62

Apple just jumped the shark if this is true. Bill Nguyen is massively talented at making things work for Bill Nguyen - his prior business bought by Apple for ~$80m, Lala.com, was lackluster at best. Under Jobs you could kind of, sort of get your head around $80m for essentially a talent acquisition in streaming / digital music which is/was an important revenue stream for AAPL. But even under Jobs the supposed golden…

bonch your account has been hellbanned. Looking at your comment history it has been for a while. Update: Just to be clear, I don't mind hellbanning spammers or obvious trolls, but looking at bonch's comment history he/she doesn't seem to be either.

that's by far worst case of that i've ever seen. is there some way we can report this and have it looked into? he shouldn't be banned, or should at least be given the respect of notification. it's been well over a year of constructive posts from that guy and nobody ever sees them. all from what looks like one snarky comment he made. that's not right.

Re: Apple Said to Acquire Color

#112

Post by brazzy »

aresant wrote: post #62

Apple just jumped the shark if this is true. Bill Nguyen is massively talented at making things work for Bill Nguyen - his prior business bought by Apple for ~$80m, Lala.com, was lackluster at best. Under Jobs you could kind of, sort of get your head around $80m for essentially a talent acquisition in streaming / digital music which is/was an important revenue stream for AAPL. But even under Jobs the supposed golden…

Having more money than you know what to do with is a sign that you've pretty much exhausted your growth potential. That's not quite the same as jumping the shark, especially if at that point you're the most valuable company in the world.

The correct thing to do is to start paying out dividends, and Apple has done that. Making a relatively small wild-ass investment vaguely related to their core business is at least a better thing to do with the other surplus money than going into finance or real estate.

Re: Apple Said to Acquire Color

#113

Post by phpnode »

Terretta wrote: post #110
zizee wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bonch your account has been hellbanned. Looking at your comment history it has been for a while. Update: Just to be clear, I don't mind hellbanning spammers or obvious trolls, but looking at bonch's comment history he/she doesn't seem to be either.

Isn't the point of this type of ban to avoid alerting the presumed troll in question? I read with showdead, and have noticed we seem to often tell auto dead users about it, which seems to defeat the point. Perhaps I've misunderstood the whole idea.

A lot of HN users find the whole concept of hell banning objectionable. Because for a large number of those affected, they're not spammers or trolls, they've just made one comment that has irked an admin. It is our duty as decent human beings to inform them.

Re: Apple Said to Acquire Color

#114

Post by cookiecaper »

megablast wrote: post #94
plinkplonk wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I eagerly await Gruber's 'pivot' on his opinion about Color, if Apple - the company that can do no wrong and is really playing 11 dimensional chess (as per his blog) - really acquired it.

Gruber is plenty critical of Apple, look at his analysis of Apple maps. He justifies why they had to do it, but still agrees it is not ready.

Heh, he is not critical of Apple at all in that piece. He grudingly accepts that the new Maps wasn't ready, but spends the rest of it begging us to forgive them because big mean Google wouldn't give Apple what they wanted for cheap. :(

Re: Apple Said to Acquire Color

#115

Post by nicholassmith »

Well if it's true it would go some way towards explaining why Color took a fair few hours after the story broke to say "No, we're not shutting down", if the deal is there it's quite likely they'd need to speak to all sides (board, investors, potential Apple negotiations etc).

If Apple pay $40mil for it then they're as stupid as a sack of rocks. If they've ponied up $10-20mil as a talent grab I can kind of see it. Either way we're talking about pocket change to a company with as much cash reserve as Apple, but if I was an investor I'd be interested in hearing why Apple thought it was a good idea.

Re: Apple Said to Acquire Color

#116

Post by rplnt »

aresant wrote: post #62

Apple just jumped the shark if this is true. Bill Nguyen is massively talented at making things work for Bill Nguyen - his prior business bought by Apple for ~$80m, Lala.com, was lackluster at best. Under Jobs you could kind of, sort of get your head around $80m for essentially a talent acquisition in streaming / digital music which is/was an important revenue stream for AAPL. But even under Jobs the supposed golden…

I still hate Apple for buying lala.com. "lala" was my generic google search when testing out working Internet connection. "Lala - where music plays" was something that I was used to see... until Apple shut it down.

Re: Apple Said to Acquire Color

#117

Post by blzabub »

aresant wrote: post #62

Apple just jumped the shark if this is true. Bill Nguyen is massively talented at making things work for Bill Nguyen - his prior business bought by Apple for ~$80m, Lala.com, was lackluster at best. Under Jobs you could kind of, sort of get your head around $80m for essentially a talent acquisition in streaming / digital music which is/was an important revenue stream for AAPL. But even under Jobs the supposed golden…

Why not an acquihire? Perhaps (pure speculation) Bill Nguyen is brilliant at hiring engineers, masterful at developing new technologies (and their associated patents), but utterly crap at productizing these technologies? Guess who is really good at productizing technologies? Seems like a perfect match, especially if Apple saw their previous acquisition of Lala as a success.

Re: Apple Said to Acquire Color

#118

Post by shiven »

phpnode wrote: post #113
Terretta wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the point of this type of ban to avoid alerting the presumed troll in question? I read with showdead, and have noticed we seem to often tell auto dead users about it, which seems to defeat the point. Perhaps I've misunderstood the whole idea.

A lot of HN users find the whole concept of hell banning objectionable. Because for a large number of those affected, they're not spammers or trolls, they've just made one comment that has irked an admin. It is our duty as decent human beings to inform them.

Precisely my biggest problem with HN. There needs to be a way to repeal HellBanning, some sort of an appeal mechanism or a time-based auto-repeal that kicks in after say 4 weeks of good behavior such as 25 upvoted (albeit dead) comments from the HBanned user.

Re: Apple Said to Acquire Color

#119

Post by Tycho »

It will be interesting to analyse this once we know more.

Previous Apple acquisitions went quiet for a while but then became part of Apples plans in a big way:

Siri, Inc. --> Siri

PA Semi --> A6 chips in Apple devices

Lala --> iTunes Match

I suppose the difference is that they all had viable products prior to acquisition. But what I'm thinking is that Color have been working on stuff which is quite clearly close to Apples photo offerings (cameras in all their devices, photo stream, iCloud, gps, Facebook integration). How much would it cost Apple to develop all that stuff? A few million I guess. But what would the oppurtunity cost be of Apple putting one of their development teams to work on these features? A lot more (judging by how much Apple's profits keep growing).

Apple don't have enough staff to capitalise on all the oppurtunities that they have (hence their massive pile of unspent cash). They can only do so much at once. But what if they find a project basically tailor made to their standards (strategically aligned, patented to the gills, high quality code-base, iOS compatibility)? Might make sense to spend their pocket money and just acquire it for a somewhat inflated price.

Re: Apple Said to Acquire Color

#120

Post by dagw »

blzabub wrote: post #117
aresant wrote: post #62

Apple just jumped the shark if this is true. Bill Nguyen is massively talented at making things work for Bill Nguyen - his prior business bought by Apple for ~$80m, Lala.com, was lackluster at best. Under Jobs you could kind of, sort of get your head around $80m for essentially a talent acquisition in streaming / digital music which is/was an important revenue stream for AAPL. But even under Jobs the supposed golden…

Why not an acquihire? Perhaps (pure speculation) Bill Nguyen is brilliant at hiring engineers, masterful at developing new technologies (and their associated patents), but utterly crap at productizing these technologies? Guess who is really good at productizing technologies? Seems like a perfect match, especially if Apple saw their previous acquisition of Lala as a success.

Then why not simply make him a job offer? Offer him a decent signing bonus to sell/hand over/wind down his current company plus a salary he can't refuse. Surely that must work out cheaper than buying a company you don't want.

And if he really doesn't want to work for Apple, trying to 'force' him by buying his company doesn't seem like a good long term strategy

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