When you’re the most valuable brand on theplanet you attract an enormous cadre of professional rumor chewers,prognosticators, and one-cup-of-tea leaf readers. Some, no doubt,confer with that “seer of seers”, the woodchuck Punxatawney Phil.The wonder is that these folks have so many readers. Includingme.
During the last week, Apple’s retail stores have had their pointof sale systems down for some kind of maintenance and upgrade.They’re also planning an all hands on deck meeting over theweekend. That’s been enough to send the Apple hype machinists intoparoxysms of speculation.
On Tuesday, Square’s Jack Dorsey let it be known he would have a”big announcement” on Monday at the upcoming TechCrunch event inNYC.
Put 2 + 2 together and what do you get? More speculation. CouldSquare be available through Apple stores? Could Square beannouncing a new product such as a tablet-based point of salesystem for small merchants (my favorite)? Could Apple be buyingSquare? Could Apple be buying Visa, combining it with Square, tocreate Squeeza and rolling out a product line called Apple Cider?Yes, this speculative frenzy does get ridiculous.
Let’s see what happens on Monday. In the meantime, I’m suddenlythirsty for some apple cider.
