Fair & Square

Ron Johnson's start as the CEO of JC Penney is off to a rough start. Ron did a fantastic job at Apple. If his new strategy at JC Penney is a good one, I wonder if he'll get a chance to see it through. This story at the Red Tape Chronicles calls into question if that will be the case.

The campaign, which launched on Feb. 1, appears to be a disaster. Revenue dropped 20 percent for the first quarter compared to last year. Customer traffic fell 10 percent. Last year, the company made $64 million in the first quarter; this year, it lost $163 million.

Hat tip to Marco.org

iOS Document Management

With WWDC only a couple weeks away, we don't have to wait very long to see what Apple has in store for us in iOS 6. Overall, I'm very happy with the OS after five iterations. This year, there doesn't appear to be any really low hanging fruit that Apple obviusly needs to address.


One area that needs some attention is file management. Apple needs to do better than they're doing now while walking a fine line between simplicity and increased capability. Rene Ritchie does a very good job of laying out one possible solution to the current file handling problem over at iMore today:


On the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you can launch the Photos app and see a list of Albums, one of which is your local album, Camera Roll, another of which is your iCloud album, Photo Stream, and the rest of which are any albums you've manually created and moved images into....


Now imagine you could launch the Files app a see a list of Folders, one of which is your local folder, Documents, another of which is your iCloud folder, Documents in the Cloud, and the rest of which are any folders you've manually created and moved documents into.

Shorting Apple

Very intelligent arcticle by Jonathan Littman over at the Huffington Post on selling Apple short.

But Apple's stock price this week or next year is not really the big story. This is a firm that has proven the tremendous value of design and innovation on a global scale. Yes it does have serious competitors in Samsung and Google. But what the Selling Apple Short narratives leave unsaid is that Apple was among the first to understand the following truth: What matters to most of us is our creativity and productivity, and frankly who wouldn't pay a little more to be smarter?

Steve Jobs' Patents

Philip Elmer-DeWitt writing for the Apple 2.0 blog:

First you have to find which of the Smithsonian's 19 museums houses the Steve Jobs' exhibit that opened last week -- not an easy task for someone unfamiliar with the monumental geography of Washington D.C.

Then, once you locate the Ripley Center -- a tiny circular building, just to the right of the Institute's big red castle -- and subject your backpack to the usual weapons search, you still have to ask (because there is no sign) where you can find The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World.

Buy Apple Today

You'll likely be filled with regret if you don't make an AAPL purchase today. Andy Zaky knows his stuff:

Today, we are initiating our 5th ever buy rating on Apple just about 11-months after the last recommendation we gave. We tend to only publish these buy rating under extraordinary circumstances, when Apple has been extremely oversold and when the stock’s valuation has become incredibly depressed. We also only publish these ratings once the markets have seen a substantial sell-off or prolonged period of consolidation.

Read the whole post and get smarter.