Marketing on Bulrush Labs — Richard Tibbetts

Apple is a Luxury Brand, Android Will Never Be

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 22:48:00 +0000

Recently I’ve had several good conversations about exactly what business Apple is in. They have clearly transcended their traditional role as a computer maker. Some people think that Apple has become a media company, or a telecommunications company. What they have really done is to become a luxury brand. As a luxury brand they are shielded from feature- and performance-based competition, enjoying higher margins and more stable revenues than other consumer electronics firms. The future of the iPhone and iPad and their strategy for competing with Android will be based on Apple’s luxury brand.

StreamBase DaVinci Coder – Free Software and Valuable Prizes (Cash)

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 11:23:00 +0000

In case people have forgotten, I work at a company I helped start called StreamBase that came out of my graduate research. The product is a stream processing engine, meaning it consumes and processes tens to hundreds of thousands of events per second, from sources like sensor networks, stock markets, or the global interweb, and computes results with very low latency, which are then delivered as more events. I happen to think that event driven architectures, stream processing, and declarative (SQL-like) languages for stream processing are the next big thing, which I am happy to talk your ear off about.

MacBook Pro – Killing the PowerBook Brand

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 19:58:00 +0000

When Apple announced the MacBook Pro, my first reaction was not to any of the hardware changes but to the name. This machine represents the end of the PowerBook brand name, a brand that dates back well before the PowerPC processor, to the first Apple notebook computers in 1991. I believed that PowerBook was one of the strongest brands in the high tech industry, and thought it was remarkably stupid to change it.
Yesterday at the University of Michigan Futuretech conference I got a chance to ask someone from Apple about it. They gave an interesting justification: Apple wants the names of all of their computers to have “Mac” in them. It is important that unsophisticated consumers have a single identifier for all Apple computers. He repeated this justification like it came off a sheet of talking-points. And it does make sense.
Which leaves the big question: What are they going to rename iBook to? My guess is we will have MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Maybe we would have seen them already, if not for rumored last-minute changes to the keynote.