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HP's Apotheker emphasized in an earnings call "the tablet effect is real and sales of the TouchPad are not meeting our expectations. The velocity of change in the personal device marketplace continues to increase as the competitive landscape is growing increasingly more complex especially around the personal computing area." By the tablet effect Apotheker means the Apple iPad. The tablet is becoming popular but not the other tablets from Samsung, HP and other makers. It is the iPad that is the product customers turn to and the tablets of competitors are not accepted as a substitute. As a result CEO Apotheker plans to exit the tablet and PC business.

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IBM performance may be affected by the shift to the cloud computing environment. Businesses increasingly prefer to rent computing capabilities and software in smaller packages and easier implementation than the costly software packages IBM sells. IBM shares declined by 8% on April 19, 2013 after revenues declined by 5% in 1st quarter 2013.

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Peers says Amazon's strategy is flawed and the new Kindle Fire tablet will cut into Amazon's already low margins. He points to the analysis of components going into tablets by IHS iSuppli, which found materials costs alone come up to over $262. For companies making hardware such as Samsung and Sony the tablets have to be priced higher. By pricing the Kindle Fire at $199, Amazon CEO Bezos, may be counting on the tablet boosting Amazon's retail business, the digital music, and the streaming of videos, and bookstores. Surveys show the tablet being used mainly for web surfing or email, and less for watching video or reading books. Amazon has the Kindle e-reader which is a better option for readers because of the price. And video sources include other suppliers including YouTube and Netflix. Apple still has the edge in resources- $76 billion in cash and investments in mid 2011- to support lower prices on newer versions of the iPad with more capabilities and design features. Apple with its supply chain experience may be able to obtain better costs from component suppliers than Amazon for future price reductions. Sony and Samsung also bring the manufacturing knowhow and expertise to do this, with Sony's added capabilities in designing devices. The H-P tablet experience shows how quickly a tablet can become obsolete in this market....

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Amazon sales growth was 81% for AWS in the 2nd quarter 2015.

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Lenovo leads in a shrinking PC market as tablets become popular in 2013.

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The unnerving and distracting effect of a long IPO process and investor demands on two co-founders of Box Inc., as competiton and market perceptions change for a once promising tech startup in cloud computing.

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Winkler says the Autonomy acquisition could be a useful step in executing H-P CEO Apotheker's new strategy to focus on higher margin businesses, but it comes at an expensive price tag. H-P paid ten times expected revenue for Autonomy, or 20 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. This is too much cash considering that the share price of H-P has dropped by half since February 2011.

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The smaller iPads like the Apple Mini 5S iPad are gaining in popularity. Apple has 32% of the iPad market. Samsung is gaining market share moving up to 18% in 2013 second quarter, up from 7.6% the prior year quarter, according to IDC. Apple is making the new iPad Air thinner and lighter from 1.4 pounds to 1 pound. The iPad Mini gets the high-resolution Retina display and goes for $400, $70 higher than the previous mini ipad which will now go for $300. Both iPads get faster processing chips, the A7 and the M7, and better antenna wifi connections. The new products will go on sale in Nov. 2013. Gartner estimates smartphone shipments at 1 billion and tablet shipments at 184 million for 2013. Tablets are expected to outsell PC's in 2015, according to IDC. The growth is rapid paced, with 2012 sales at 120 million tablets, increasing from about 17 million in 2010 when the iPad was first introduced.

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Fred Brooks, IBM executive who led the development team for the IBM System/360 mainframe, is the author of Design of Design and of an earlier book Mythical Man-Month that sold 500,000 copies. His unique insights into completing large development projects have helped many tech companies. Brook's law from Mythical Man-Month is that it is futile to simply add engineers to projects in the hope of getting things done faster, as there are a lot of other factors to consider. This is stated by programmers as: "Adding manpower to a project only makes it later." The original design team has to bring newcomers up to speed, and the added distraction is one of the many factors that slow down the project. Brooks offers many new insights in the book Design for Design. One is that constraints are friends which help shrink the designer's search space. Another is that Design is a lot more about art as it is about science. Simply improving the process does not get you great design, it gets you from bad to average....

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The old NASDAQ in 2000 cannot be compared to the new NASDAQ in 2015 because the companies in the index have changed, and the proportion of tech and health care companies has also changed. Healthcare and consumer companies are now 37% on the index compared to 18% in the NASDAQ index in 2000. Tech is a much smaller component of the NASDAQ, declining from 64% to 43%. And three companies Apple, Google and Microsoft, makeup 20% of the index, with Amazon, Facebook and Intel added making that 30% of the entire 2015 NASDAQ index. Only 3 of the top ten companies in the 2000 NASDAQ are around in 2015 NASDAQ index- Intel Corp., Microsoft, and Cisco Systems. Yahoo, Oracle, Dell, Sun, JDS, WorldCom are no longer the top 10 companies in the index as they were in 2015. The speculative momentum stocks such as Netflix and Tesla make up 0.38% and 0.33% of the NASDAQ in 2015. In healthcare part of NASDAQ 2015 companies such as Gilead Sciences and Amgen are in the top ten.