Apple and Google competitors closing the gap

Apple Mac sales have been gaining ground. This is largely attributed to the "halo effect", ie increased interest in macs due to success of the ipod. I agree the halo effect is driving interest however macs have had a competitive advantage over windows xp. Mac OS X is more current, and looks better. Apple is likely to loose some of that competitive edge with release of Windows Vista.

Regarding Google and Yahoo, Yahoo is finally rolling out Panama, their new system for advertising that replaces the system put in place with the acquisition of Overture. It is more or less a copy of Google's Adwords system and is likely to dramatically increase their revenues.

I am still bullish on Apple and Google long term, but in the short term their competitors are likely to close the gap slightly.

zune and the high end market

One problem that Microsoft's zune player will face is that apple has already captured a large portion of the high end consumers. The ones who are willing to pay for the convenience of using itunes. These consumers are largely locked in because songs bought through itunes won't play on other players without some effort. (for instance burning and then ripping the songs as mp3s). However some people think Microsft may try to buy these users out by giving them free copies of songs they bought on itunes. While I think this is a good idea, it exemplifies how hard it is going to be for anyone to compete with the ipod. Even if they are free I hope they make it quick and easy to download all the songs.

Cingular deal puts pressure on Apple

Cingular anounced a deal with XM, Yahoo music and others. This puts heat on apple and their ipod. I agree with this article it's very likely apple will become a mobile virtual network operator (mvno). i.e. selling cell phone services through their brand. Especially since Steve Jobs is a major shareholder in another company that is an mvno, namely disney mobile.
The ipod is likely to face competition from mp3/cell phones and they are developing an ipod/cell phone, (iPhone?) (hopefully better received than the dissapointing rockr) and they risk being cut out as the service provider. i.e. people buy music from their cell phone provider instead of through itunes.

I am bullish on apple and hold a modest position in the company.

Today I found out it's important to put action tags in forms even if you are submitting to the same page. Most browsers work without the action tag, but AOL browser on the Mac fails.

An interesting fact that i was unaware of, apple has an open source project called darwin that lets OS X run on x86 the platform. Darwin is just the underlying FreeBSD command line OS, not the rich GUI OS X shell that runs on top.