Randomly Noted

Here’s a good one for you – It’s Carl Icahn’s fault that Blockbuster Inc. is in the sad state it is in today. At least that’s the view of disgruntled junior bondholder Lyme Regis Partners, who claim in a lawsuit that Icahn set the video retail chain to fail so that he could take over the company (as reported on Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review).

The lawsuit goes on to allege that because of his insider status, Icahn had a much better view of how bad things were for Blockbuster and there that allowed allowed him to position himself ahead of the other investors because he knew before everyone else that the company was much closer to bankruptcy.

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Ok, maybe not the whole world. But the technology world. The new Apple tablet is being introduced by CEO Steve Jobs. It has the look and feel of combining a big iPhone with a small laptop. Runs a lot of the popular Apple software and of course, has the iTunes applications from songs to games to movies to subway maps to calculators etc. Waiting to hear about the price and whether it will be delivered only WiFi or perhaps through cell phone carriers. Here’s Jobs demonstrating the iPad (the name of the tablet) with a giant version shown on a screen in the background.

Actually, that’s not me. I’m an admirer of the Apple-Jobs phenomenon – from afar. The last Apple I owned was a Mac II in the late 1980s; it did what I needed it to do as I typed up grad school research papers. Today, I own an MP3 player, but not an iPod. Mine is a Zen, by Creative Arts; I bought it when we lived in Singapore. It works fine – I listen to music and watch old episodes of “Weeds” and “Dexter” during the daily train commute. (My husband downloads this stuff for me – a sign of how un-tech-savvy I am.) I have a Blackberry – that is, it has me in its Crackberry grip. It’s my phone, my email, my address book, my “to do” list – and my route to online newspapers and magazines. Small as the Blackberry is, I manage to read it for an average of three hours a day. You may be like me – intrigued by all things Apple but not obsessed enough to really care what the new tablet’s called (iPad) or to road-test it when it hits stores. All that said, if the new Apple tablet is totally and utterly convenient for all the functions described above, I may buy it. (The price, around $500-800, looks reasonable.) Moreover, if fairly neutral, even apathetic, people like me succumb, the sky’s the limit for Steve Jobs’ company. You see, Jobs already owns the die-hard Apple freaks, and  he’ll never seduce the anti-Apple clique. But middle-ground people like me – fly-over country, so to speak – who use cell phones, MP3 players and Blackberries, but find one or all of them not quite right for our multi-media purposes – we just might be lured to Apple country with the right new product.