The other day I read a post on the insightful blog “AVC”, which is written by venture capitalist Fred Wilson. The post dealt with Fred’s thoughts on some technology trends for 2015 and beyond. As usual the post was written in clear and measured prose. I took note of his comment that he believed the Apple Watch (iWatch) would not be a smashing success similar to the iphone or ipad, but didn’t give it much thought beyond that at the time.
January 2nd I arrived late to our Manhattan trading floor and was looking forward to a short work day. I noticed a link on my Twitter feed about the iWatch potentially being a flop that linked to a Business Insider (BI) article. The article referenced Fred’s blog post. I smiled as I knew that Fred had never said the iWatch would flop but BI had decided that he had. His words were:
The Apple Watch will not be the homerun product that iPod, iPhone, and iPad have been.
I think his words leave open the possibility that the Apple Watch could be a double and not necessarily a strikeout as BI seems to be saying!
Around 9:45AM I saw a tweet from Fred expressing his frustration that an article on BI claimed he declared the iWatch would be a “flop”. Around the same time various filters on my trading platform indicated there was unusual trading activity in Apple’s stock. I posted the following on Stocktwits.
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Perhaps I should have posted “Business Insider distorts Fred Wilson article causing traders to sell Apple on a slow news day”.
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Fred’s blog discusses current and future technology trends and how they impact people’s lives. As a technophile I enjoy Fred’s columns very much as well as the high level of discourse that takes place in the comments section. I don’t know Fred personally but having read his column for years he strikes me as fairly laid back and not easily riled up, so it seems likely he felt strongly what BI had done was very inappropriate behavior.
BI’s reaction to Fred’s outrage was along the lines of “you wrote an opinion piece and we interpreted it in a certain way which makes perfect sense to us.”
A chart on BI that shows a series of projected iWatch sales for 2015 caught my attention. One of the projections was from “BI Intelligence”. This appears to be a research service that is part of BI and charges for the reports that they produce. BI Intelligence is at the low end of projections, so poor performance of the iWatch would be a notch in their belt. Henry Blodget, BI CEO, has tweeted several times that he is highly skeptical that the iWatch will be successful as well. And now BI’s Deputy Editor Jay Yarrow has written a post that says there is no in between for the iWatch it will either be a hit or a flop. I suppose he did this in response to Fred’s and many others commenting that it is very possible to achieve a level of success somewhere between a flop and a hit.
So in summary, a division of BI is projecting low iWatch sales, their CEO is tweeting he thinks it will do poorly, and finally they ran a “news story” claiming one of the top venture capitalists in the country as supporting their view that the iWatch will “flop”. I’ll allow you to be the judge as to who is being fair and balanced in this instance.
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