{"id":11579,"date":"2012-02-08T09:07:24","date_gmt":"2012-02-08T14:07:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=11579"},"modified":"2012-02-08T11:11:30","modified_gmt":"2012-02-08T16:11:30","slug":"annaly-rimm-and-the-end-of-illness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=11579","title":{"rendered":"Annaly, RIMM and The End of Illness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Annaly reported lower realized earnings, <\/strong>but much higher unrealized earnings. You can read Annaly’s entire complex financial release here.<\/a> <\/strong>I have faith in Annaly’s management. They’re doing the right, conservative thing for us shareholders. I don’t know how last night’s report will be reflected in today’s market. I’ll be watching carefully.
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I’m not short RIMM at present.<\/strong> (I am short RadioShack.) RIMM has bounced back from its December lows — but on nothing of substance.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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I’m tempted to short it again, especially after reading this from the latest New Yorker:<\/p>\n

The Financial Page<\/em>
\nBlackberry Season<\/strong>
\nby James Surowiecki<\/p>\n

Five years ago, Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, was one of the most acclaimed technology companies in the world. The BlackBerry dominated the smartphone market, was a staple of the business world, and had helped make texting a mainstream practice. Terrifically profitable, the phone became a cultural touchstone-in 2006, a Webster’s dictionary made “CrackBerry” its word of the year.<\/p>\n

These days, it seems more like the SlackBerry. Thanks to the iPhone and Android devices, R.I.M.’s smartphone market share has plummeted; in the U.S., according to one estimate, it fell from forty-four per cent in 2009 to just ten per cent last year. The BlackBerry’s reputed addictiveness now looks like a myth; a recent study found that only a third of users planned to stick with it the next time they upgraded. R.I.M.’s stock price is down seventy-five per cent in the past year, and two weeks ago the company was forced to bring in a new C.E.O. The Times wondered recently whether the BlackBerry will go the way of technological dodoes like the pager.<\/p>\n

The easy explanation for what happened to R.I.M. is that, like so many other companies, it got run over by Apple. But the real problem is that the technology world changed, and R.I.M. didn’t. The BlackBerry was designed for businesses. Its true customers weren’t its users but the people who run corporate information-technology departments. The BlackBerry gave them what they wanted most: reliability and security. It was a closed system, running on its own network. The phone’s settings couldn’t easily be tinkered with by ordinary users. So businesses loved it, and R.I.M.’s assumption was that, once companies embraced the technology, consumers would, too.<\/p>\n

This pattern-of winning over business and government markets and then reaching consumers-is a time-honored one. The telegraph was initially taken up mainly by railroads, financial institutions, and big companies. The telephone, though it became popular with consumers relatively quickly, was first used principally as a business tool. The typewriter’s biggest users were offices. The Internet originated in the military-industrial complex, and first found an audience among academics and scientists. The personal computer, though popular with hobbyists early on, came to market dominance only once I.B.M. introduced models targeted squarely at businesses. Historically, new technologies have been very expensive-when phone service was introduced in New York, it cost the equivalent of two thousand dollars a month-and so early adopters have generally been companies that could make (or save) money by using them. (It’s telling that the biggest exception to the business-first pattern was television, where the business applications were less obvious.) In 2006, it looked to R.I.M. as if the story of the smartphone market would echo the story of the telegraph.<\/p>\n

It didn’t. In fact, even as the BlackBerry was at the height of its popularity, we were entering the age of what’s inelegantly called the consumerization of I.T., or simply Bring Your Own Device. In this new era, technological diffusion started to flow the other way-from consumers to businesses. Social media went from being an annoying fad to an unavoidable part of the way many businesses work. Tablets, which many initially thought were just underpowered laptops, soon became common among salesmen, hospital staffs, and retailers. So, too, with the iPhone and Androids. They’ve always been targeted at consumers, and tend to come with stuff that I.T. departments hate, like all those extraneous apps. Yet, because employees love them, businesses have adapted (and the iPhone and Androids have upgraded security to make themselves more business-friendly). As a result, the iPhone and Androids now control more than half the corporate mobile market.<\/p>\n

Consumerization has been disastrous for R.I.M., because the company has seemed clueless about what consumers want. R.I.M. didn’t bring out a touch-screen phone until long after Apple, and the device that it eventually launched was a pale imitation of the iPhone. Although the BlackBerry brand name was once seen as a revolutionary success, over time R.I.M.’s product line became bewilderingly large, with inscrutable model names. If you’re a consumer, do you want the 8300 or the seemingly identical 8330? And the BlackBerry’s closed system has left R.I.M. ill equipped for a world in which phones and tablets are platforms for the whole app ecosystem.<\/p>\n

The consumerization of I.T. has deep economic and social roots and is unlikely to go away. Technological innovation has dramatically lowered the cost of computing, making it possible for large numbers of consumers to own powerful new technologies at reasonably low prices. (Apple’s products seem pricey, but despite the weak economy it has sold more than a hundred million iPhones and more than forty million iPads.) The workplace is changing, too. The barrier between work and home has been eroded, and if people are going to have to be constantly connected they want at least to use their own phones. Companies have quickly come to love consumerization, too: a recent study by the consulting firm Avanade found that executives like the way it keeps workers plugged in all day long. And since workers often end up paying for their own devices, it can also help businesses cut costs. One way or another, consumers are going to have more and more say over what technologies businesses adopt. It’s a brave new world. It’s just not the one that the BlackBerry was built for. \u0004<\/p>\n

The End of Illness:<\/strong><\/span> You get older. Your friends get sick. They die. You focus on your own bellybutton more. I spent the last few days reading this excellent book:<\/p>\n

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Dr. Agus is an oncologist, i.e. cancer doctor.\u00a0 Cancer can’t be cured. But it can somewhat be prevented. He focuses on prevention techniques, most of which are obvious:<\/p>\n

+ Serious regular exercise. “The teaching that “some exercise is better than none, while more is better than some” may seem simplistic and obvious for us, but it took a breathtaking sixty-odd years of research before it was accepted. … In 2009 another study emerged clearly showing evidence that exercise causes your brain to boost production of certain chemicals known to have antidepressant effects. Anything that helps us stave off depression and cultivate happiness is good for health. The researchers also discovered that exercise excited a gene for a nerve growth factor called VGF. VGFs are small proteins critical to the development and maintenance of nerve cells, which further links exercise to brain health and the prevention of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.”<\/p>\n

+ Healthy living. Healthy diet.<\/p>\n

+ Regularity in eating, sleep, rest, etc. Eat, sleep, exercise, on a schedule. Eat at the same time every day. Sleep at the same time, etc.<\/p>\n

Some surprises:<\/p>\n

+ Multivitamin tablets are a total waste of time and money. Worse, they could actually be dangerous to your health, including stimulate cancer. “To these researchers’ surprise, those who admitted to taking lots of vitamins (“excessive use,” defined as more than seven times per week) showed an increased risk of advanced and fatal prostate cancers. … “More disturbing still, a 2010 study of Swedish women revealed that those who took multivitamins were 19 percent more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer over a ten-year period than those who didn’t.”<\/p>\n

+ Eat well. Get your nutrition-including naturally occurring vitamins and minerals-from real, whole food that is as close to nature as possible. Don’t trust anything that comes out of a blender, juicer, or glass jar. Buy frozen fruits and vegetables or “fresh flash-frozen” over what many supermarkets sell as just fresh.<\/p>\n

+ Don’t sit for hours. (You don’t want to hear how bad sitting is for you.)<\/p>\n

+ Iceberg lettuce\u00a0 has nil nutritional value.<\/p>\n

+ Take a statin (e.g. Lipitor) regularly. “Statins, the drugs that block inflammation as we’ve seen, are one of the few drugs that will prevent you from being put on a ventilator if you come down with swine flu. For this reason, many CDC officials carry statins with them wherever they go, right alongside some meat tenderizer. Why meat tenderizer? Should an official be bitten by a feisty, potentially menacing bug, what’s good for your steak is good for the bite. Meat tenderizer contains papain, which breaks down the protein toxins in the venom. A bottle of classic Adolph’s is often the best treatment for jellyfish, bee, and yellow jacket stings, mosquito bites, and possibly stingray wounds.”<\/p>\n

+ Eat less. Sixty-five percent of Americans are overweight or obese. This has predictable and awful consequences for their health, and their likely contracting cancer.<\/p>\n

+ Sleep more.\u00a0 Losing as few as one and a half hours that our body needs for just one night can reduce daytime alertness by about a third. The side effects of poor sleep habits are many: hypertension, confusion, memory loss, inability to concentrate.<\/p>\n

+ If you’re old, take a baby Aspirin every day.<\/p>\n

+ Keep track of your health in an electronic diary. Only you can figure how the variables affect your unique body.<\/p>\n

+ Depression is shaping up to be a major problem, largely brought on by bad living. (See above.)<\/p>\n

The book instances study after study to back up his conclusions.<\/p>\n

Syria’s Ground Zero.<\/strong><\/span> The city of Homs is bearing the brunt of Bashar al-Assad’s bloody crackdown. Horrible pictures from Foreign Policy magazine. Click here. <\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Latest favorite New Yorker cartoons:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Harry Newton who buys his lightbulbs from Bulbs.com<\/strong><\/a>. If you need some bulbs, use this promo code FEB29DEAL. Save yourself 10%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Annaly reported lower realized earnings, but much higher unrealized earnings. You can read Annaly’s entire complex financial release here. I have faith in Annaly’s management. They’re doing the right, conservative thing for us shareholders. I don’t know how last night’s report will be reflected in today’s market. I’ll be watching carefully. I’m not short RIMM […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}