RIMM too sexy to be single?

We wrote about it back in this January post but now bigger, more connected sources like Kara Swisher are writing about the release of Microsoft Windows Mobile 7 and how they might need to do something big. The scuttlebutt is that Ballmer would love to buy RIM at the same time it sounds like they realize that buying PALM, while it is much cheaper, won’t really get them anywhere. We stick to our guns on RIMM both as a fundamental story and a too-sexy-to-be-left-alone technology player.

Is Adobe FLASH an endangered species?

We’re not going to get into the technology pissing contest of HTML 5 versus FLASH here. There are dozens of sites that will numb your brain going over it all. The point however is that lots of things are popping up that developers are getting excited about – the iPhone, Android, the Cloud, Facebook, Twitter and now the iPad. So much opportunity, so few incremental buyers of CS5?

Part of the problem is there is a simmering resentment out there for how fat Adobe has been getting off of $1500 software “suites” and $500 upgrade fees. It’s all great stuff but while technology pricing always feels like it’s coming down Adobe feels like a high tax and it reminds people how proprietary FLASH.

Even if FLASH continues to dominate and Adobe does “just fine” with CS5 and future releases if investors perceive it more like Microsoft which “does just fine” with Windows and all that jazz they will be trading at a multiple closer to the old guard.

The conventional content model implosion picks up steam.

Again we’ve penned on this topic before but over here on the Creative Destruction blog. Thanks to the Amazon/Apple dust up with Macmillan the crowds are gathering around the content pricing ring to watch the fight.

There were some stories out today that cable companies should simply focus back on the broadband and stop trying to be in the media business by packaging and charging for entertainment content. It’s certainly something to worry about for them but given their culture it’s hard to see how they work around that part of their core business.

The issue of “what’s the right price” for an online book is fascinating. Part of the problem the entire industry faces is the “casual user” factor. The picture of one set of people pounding the table that “it has to be $14.99″ and another saying “it has to be $9.99″ is absurd. What about lending books? Right now whatever I pay online I can’t lend it to anyone. Why shouldn’t an online book be $5? Nobody knows. Maybe it should be priced by the chapter? That could work for non-fiction anyway, I’d like that model.

As usual most of the discussion we see appears to ignore the consumer, the typical or newly possible use cases. Instead it focuses on some futile preservation of the old model in an entirely new era.

[Disclosure: The Research 2.0 model portfolio contains shares of Apple and RIM at the time of this writing.]