The details of this information remain sketchy, although the report suggests that French carriers are concerned that Apple’s contracts hold back competition by setting excessively high quotas for iPhone sales, thereby making it difficult to assign marketing resources to rival smartphones. While no one is forcing the operators to sell the iPhone, they really want to do so because customers want it, and that means agreeing to Apple’s demands. The terms of such contracts are always secret.

Here’s a statement sent out on Friday by Antoine Colombani, spokesman for Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia:

“The markets for smartphones and tablets are very dynamic, innovative and fast-growing. Samsung’s growing market position and the success of Google’s Android platform are good reasons to believe that competition is strong in the markets for smartphones and tablets.

“The Commission has been made aware of Apple’s distribution practices for iPhones and iPads. There have been no formal complaints, though. The Commission is currently looking at the situation and, more generally, is actively monitoring market developments. We will intervene if there are indications of anticompetitive behaviour to the detriment of consumers.”

I find it hard to believe this will come to anything. As the statement suggests, iOS devices are not the only game in town — in fact, the iPhone only has around 25 percent share of the smartphone market across the five biggest European economies. Apple certainly has a lot of weight to throw around in the mobile market, but nowhere near enough as to constitute a monopoly.

A good (though not perfect) point of comparison here would be Intel, which found itself the subject of a $1.45 billion EU fine back in 2009 for abuse of its dominant position. Intel, which utterly dominated the x86 processor market as it does now, gave secret kickbacks to computer manufacturers and retailers for not stocking AMD-based products. It even paid manufacturers to delay or cancel the launch of non-Intel products.

That was a clear-cut case of illegal practices, hurting consumers by limiting their choices. It’s hard, if not impossible, to argue that consumers in the EU do not have easy access to non-Apple mobile devices. In the Intel case, those manufacturers and retailers did not seriously have the option of telling the chipmaker to show itself the door. In this Apple business, the anonymous carriers in question could likely have done what U.S. Cellular did, and just not stock the iPhone. There are plenty of alternatives.

I suspect that the carriers in this situation are simply trying to weaken Apple’s hand in contract negotiations, and that the Commission is highly unlikely to step in and help.

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Apple’s most popular product is the iPhone. It makes most of its money from the iPhone too, leaving little doubt that it is the company’s core product. But in a quarter without a new iPhone, and one in which the iPad has continued to gather steam as it’s released in more countries, it’s worth wondering if the iPad could be finally rivaling the iPhone in terms of sales and significance to Apple’s bottom line when it reports its fiscal third-quarter earnings on Tuesday.

The iPhone, no matter what, is the product that will determine how investors react to these quarterly results — overall revenue is expected to be somewhere around $37.4 billion and earnings per share $10.35. If sales are up from the 20.3 million iPhones sold during the same quarter last year and the 35.1 million sold between January and March this year, investors will be ecstatic. Analyst predictions for iPhone sales cover a wide range, from 27 million units to 38.5 million units.

One bit of data that could be making Apple investors slightly nervous heading into Tuesday’s call is Verizon’s results from last week. The carrier sold 2.7 million iPhones during the quarter, making it the single most popular smartphone model it sold, but that total is down from the 3.2 million sold in the previous quarter. It’s just one carrier — AT&T’s data won’t be available until later this week — which obviously doesn’t account for the hundreds of other carriers around the world that sell the iPhone. But it is one hint.

Still, even without a new device, Apple took some important strategic steps with iPhone distribution during the quarter, which could help make up for any dropoff with Verizon sales. Apple attempted to broaden its customer base by adding its first prepaid carriers in the U.S. with Cricket and Virgin Mobile.

Meanwhile, iPad sales are expected to shatter records. Last quarter’s results, 11.8 million, included less than one month of sales data with the third-generation iPad on store shelves, and in just a few countries. Apple added 21 countries during the quarter to bring the total to 56, the fastest it has rolled out a new version of the tablet yet. And that has Apple watchers pegging sales between 12.7 million and 24 million units. For perspective, the record is 15.4 million, and that was over a holiday quarter.

It’s possible that the iPad could start venturing into iPhone territory. The two devices would be in the same ballpark if the iPhone came out on the low side of estimates (27 million) and iPad on the high side (24 million).

No matter what, it’s likely going to be another quarter that will enable Apple CEO Tim Cook to talk about the post-PC world Apple is building. Apple’s Mac sales figures are one of the bigger mysteries going into these earnings, but Mac sales trail its iOS cousins by a large margin.

It was a difficult quarter for outsiders to read the performance of the Mac business. Apple waited almost a year to update its laptop lineup, causing many customers to sit out making purchases. (That was reflected in last quarter’s results which saw very modest 7 percent year-over-year sales growth.) The updated MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and new MacBook Pro with Retina display were introduced at WWDC and went on sale late last month, which means that those new orders aren’t likely to have a huge impact on the quarterly numbers. And the two research firms that keep track of PC sales had widely divergent data regarding Mac sales: IDC showed Apple’s U.S. computer sales dipped slightly by 1.1 percent, while Gartner showed Macs bucking the wider industry trend, seeing its Mac sales rise by almost 2 million units compared to the same quarter a year ago.

These are now the three legs of the stool that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs once used as a metaphor for Apple’s business: back then, it was the Mac, the iPhone and the iPod, but the iPad has supplanted the once ubiquitous music player. The iPod and the Apple TV are relevant to Apple’s quarterly earnings only in terms of the questions they now spark. As in, does Apple ever plan on doing a significant update to the iPod lineup again? And what exactly are Apple’s plans for the living room?

Those are interesting questions, but Tuesday will belong to the iPhone and iPad.

This post was updated at 11:35 a.m. with the correct EPS consensus.

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As a founder of multiple software startups, I’ve seen this time and again. Taking your software startup from inception to profitability while selling into an enterprise market demands a different approach. Enterprises are often slow moving, process-oriented, hierarchical beasts. As I addressed in yesterday’s post, startups must understand their enterprise customers’ unique characteristics and needs in order to gain a foothold.

This doesn’t mean assessing the overall market size and talking in the abstract about faceless corporations. It’s about understanding the intricate and complicated components of your target customer and requires much more thought and effort than simply building a product, putting up a website and hoping people show up at your door. In this post, we’ll look at the key questions startup founders must ask of themselves and the enterprise market.

Know yourself and your market

1. How are you perceived in the market?

Most companies are risk averse when it comes to dealing with and buying from enterprise software startups. If you’ve ever sold into an enterprise, chances are you’ve been asked about your funding and financial viability. Or buyers are worried that they won’t get the handholding they deserve, because you don’t have the staff to support them. They don’t care about your other customers, except in terms of how financially stable that makes you, and who they are (if marquee customers are already using your product, that serves as a form of “social proof.”)

Think of this issue in terms of innovation versus status quo. You don’t want to pretend you’re running a big, old school company, but you also don’t want to look like one half of a two-person startup in a garage. Some ways to do this?

• Offer a 1-800 number for customers to call (Grasshopper and other similar services will do the trick.)
• Use press releases to market in a more traditional way
• Build thought leadership through a corporate blog and guest blog writing on other sites
• Publicize news about your company that indicates stability such as the addition of a quality advisory board, raising capital, acquiring customers, etc.
• Get customer case studies as soon as possible

You want to present yourself in a manner that will simultaneously let enterprise customers know that you mean business (and have the wherewithal and sophistication to service them) and at the same time have the innovative technology and scrappiness of a startup.

2. What are your distribution channels?

You should never outsource responsibility for sales until you absolutely understand how your sales work, whom you’re selling to, pricing, sales cycle, etc. Once you’ve gone through the sales process a bunch of times, and you’ve nailed down a fairly repeatable process, you can start outsourcing the responsibility. Until then, spend all of your time in sales learning as much as you can directly from your customers, and keep those one-to-one relationships close. After you’ve developed a sales process that works, then you scale.

A good option for scaling is through distribution channels. Distribution channels give small enterprise startups much more reach into the market. There may be partners with pre-existing customer relationships that you can leverage. Often these partners won’t have your technical sophistication or innovation capabilities, but they will have a larger sales force and greater market access.

3. What are the key market buying cycles?

Companies plan their budgets well in advance for future purchases. They set year-long strategic goals that impact what they look to buy and how much they’re willing to spend. You want to be top-of-mind during these market-planning phases. There will always be discretionary spending and freedom to experiment with new technologies, but don’t miss out on injecting yourself into these key budget cycles.

September to December is usually a good time for enterprise software companies to make a lot of sales. Departments have unused budget and they’re trying to move fast. Summers are often pretty quiet, and so you need to be making a lot of noise in the spring to carry you through the summer into a great buying period in the fall. However, because patterns vary, you must determine your own customers’ purchasing cycles as quickly as possible.

4. What are the nitty-gritty pitfalls?

This is a catchall bucket for me when it comes to knowing your market. If you’ve done your homework and answered all of the questions outlined in this and my previous blog, you probably have already identified the sneaky little details — such as adequate customer support, training and understanding customer buying patterns — that can trip up the sales process. Knowing these allows you to tackle them in advance and adjust your strategy. It also allows you to change how you sell your product into the market. Maybe you have to go up the food chain to someone with more buying power, maybe you have to change your pricing structure. The more you know about yourself and your market — including the types of companies you’re going after, the departments and the individuals in those departments and companies — the better prepared you’ll be to build faster traction.

With more than a decade of experience managing and building software startups, Jevon MacDonald is an authority on co-browsing Web technologies. His company, GoInstant, delivers a patent-pending technology that provides “shared” Web-browsing capabilities.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Rojer.

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As a founder of multiple software startups, including my current company, GoInstant, I’ve learned a few lessons about selling into this singular market. While my companies have achieved success and were able to implement strategic alliances with large enterprise companies, such as IBM and Jive Software, it didn’t happen overnight. In my experience, if you’re looking to sell into the enterprise, there are two golden rules: know your customer and know yourself.

Knowing your market is critical. Knowing how customers want to buy, how they buy, and how you can package your solution with the appropriate support, training and value proposition is critical for gaining success in the enterprise space. Enterprise companies are slow — and loathe — to switch out existing systems. Once you get into a company and it is using your product actively, this is an advantage. But as the underdog trying to break in, it’s a huge disadvantage.

In this blog post, the first of a two-part series, we’ll examine five key questions that need to be addressed to fully understand the enterprise customer in order to gain a foothold. In part two, we’ll look at the important questions you need to answer about your own business, as well as the overall market.

Understanding your customer

1. How much should you genuinely innovate versus the status quo?

The status quo or “good enough” is an extremely powerful force. Entrepreneurs clamoring to innovate don’t always realize that companies may actually like something we don’t consider valuable. But just because you would never use it in your startup, don’t assume something isn’t good for your customer. You need to carefully consider the purpose it fills for the enterprise organization. Because large organizations have different concerns and requirements, something that looks broken to you may still be serving an important purpose internally.

Additionally, too many enterprise startups identify top-level problems without appreciating the layers of complexity underneath them. They see a big “obvious” problem (for example: “recruiting top talent is hard”) and assume there is a technological solution that they can build. But look underneath one problem and you’ll find three others. There may be issues with how internal departments communicate, or who owns the budget for specific things, the sophistication of the staff, or something else that’s going to roadblock your great solution.

2. Who are you selling to?

Every company has a hierarchy. There will be gatekeepers (lower-level folks that are tasked with doing research on your market), mid-level managers with some budget but restricted on spending without higher up approval (probably around $5,000 per year), and then C-level executives. You have to be strategic in how you sell to enterprises and how you move up (or down) the food chain, and how the value proposition changes along the way.

One of the best ways to do this is to get engaged within the organization and be accessible. Today’s enterprise buyers have taken a proactive approach in seeking out great software. Your job is to be sure that you are easily available and can clearly and effectively communicate and tailor the value of your solution as needed to people of all levels you’re selling to throughout the organization.

When talking with C-level execs, you need to be able to communicate how your solution can contribute to their overall business goals at a higher level, including projected ROI. Connecting them with C-level execs in other organizations who have already adopted your product might also help. At a mid-level, your approach should focus more on solving a specific business problem within their organization and streamlining existing processes.

3. How are you training customers?

Even with relatively simple software, companies ask about training. Most enterprise startups can’t afford to do on-site training, so look for other ways to provide the necessary handholding and comfort level customers need. One option is to create a video tutorial library. Video tutorials are easy to do and very effective for training. They’re also helpful when your customers on-board new employees or want to introduce your product into other areas of the organization.

4. What level of customer support do you offer?

Most legacy software companies offer poor support (and it’s generally quite expensive), so this presents an opportunity for enterprise startups. However, because startup founders focus heavily on innovation and product development, they often believe that these attributes are also the most important for customers as well. This ignores the premium that enterprise customers place on support — a value that frequently supersedes the fact that your software may be free and offers tons of cool new features.

The value you deliver is in the overall solutions package that you can offer to enterprise customers. And key to that package is a quality experience that contributes to the customer’s own success. While your features may, in fact, be groundbreaking, if they don’t facilitate better work processes for the customer, if they cannot be easily implemented and adopted throughout the organization, and if they cannot offer guaranteed performance, they don’t provide the value that’s required.

5. What are companies’ buying habits?

Enterprises are accustomed to long sales cycles, approvals, demos, trials, more demos and so forth. Changing those habits is not always easy, and in some cases you’ll have to play by the rules to get a foot in the door. At the same time, customers can stretch things out forever, and you will lose momentum quickly.

As with all the aforementioned, this is a delicate balancing act. You need to push your agenda and your sales strategy as much as possible. But you also need to weigh everything with an acute understanding of how your customers like to buy things and the processes they have to go through internally.

As I mentioned earlier, gaining a foothold in the enterprise market doesn’t happen overnight. But without a consistent and laser-like focus on your customers’ needs, it won’t happen at all. In my next post, I’ll take a look at the questions that you need to ask yourself to make sure you’re on the right track.

With more than a decade of experience managing and building software startups, Jevon MacDonald is currently the CEO and co-founder of GoInstant. The startup delivers a co-browsing experience for enterprise customers and consumers. Its patent-pending technology aims to help enterprise customers improve sales, customer support and problem solving processes.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Rojer.

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Twitter is set to reach $1 billion in sales by 2014, significantly outpacing analyst predictions and demonstrating the company’s advertising viability, sources tell Bloomberg.

The company earned $139.5 million in 2011, analysts say, which means if Bloomberg’s sources are correct, demand for advertising is taking off among companies looking to grow their presence on the platform.

Bloomberg’s sources said the company could change or alter those predictions, which, of course, aren’t exactly official.

Twitter will likely reach this milestone slightly more than eight years after it was founded in March 2006, putting it behind companies like Facebook, which took six years to hit $1 billion in sales, and Google, which took five, Bloomberg reports.

The revenue projections demonstrate that Twitter feels pretty good about the strength of the company’s business model, which was something of a question mark in its earlier years. Twitter was reluctant to emphasize the business side of its product, but has recently expanded its focus on advertising.

Advertising on Twitter takes the form of promoted Tweets, trends and accounts. Twitter also recently rolled out self-serve advertising for smaller businesses looking for promotion.

The company has wrestled with advertising revenue in the past, sharing the concern of companies like Facebook in trying to determine whether “ads inserted into social activity actually work,” as Matthew Ingram wrote earlier this year. The monetary value of a Twitter retweet or a Facebook “like” is still a question mark for brands looking to advertise, which The Wall Street Journal explored recently.

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Created three years ago along with fellow Evite alum Al Lieb, ClearSlide aims to update sales for the wired present, rescuing reps from thumb drives, massive attachments and clunky web conferencing solutions, offering a simple, cloud-based solution for sales pros to share content either over email, during a live pitch or at an in-person presentation. Teams upload all their decks, videos and other content to ClearSlide (the product doesn’t include authoring), which generates a branded link that a prospect can click to view the material in a quick, clean environment, no downloading required. Reps can also lead prospects through the material, interacting with rich media such as calculators or live web pages within it and pulling up additional materials to answer prospects’ objections.

“When we looked at the market, all the investment in the space has been in CRM. There’s really nothing for sales to help them communicate with customers. We saw a big need there,” Lieb told GigaOM. His company’s approach to filling that gap appears to be working, with ClearSlide announcing a handful of new customers today, including CareerBuilder, Gannett., ShareThis and Wayfair, as well as revenue growth of 400 percent in the last year. Expedia, Yahoo, Amazon are already customers and ClearSlide received $11 million in series A funding led by Greylock Partners in September of last year.

Of course, ClearSlide isn’t the only company helping folks share presentations. WebEx, GoToMeeting and SlideRocket offer some of the same capabilities, but ClearSlide is more specifically focused on sales, combining tools for email and in-person presenting, as well as the virtual pitch. “Most of the solutions in the space are designed around web conferencing, WebEx for example,” explains Lieb. “One of the things we think is unique about ClearSlide is we have a broad horizontal package that ties it all together. It’s really email we’re competing with.” Plus, ClearSlide offers analytics.

Send a link to prospects and ClearSlide will tell you not only when they open it but how long they spend on each slide, as well as aggregating data on a specific deck to show managers what’s getting looked at and what’s being ignored. “We’re giving sales reps back-end data that’s really actionable, so we’re helping them better service their prospects by understanding how they have engaged with the content. Sales guys are able to follow up smarter,” says Benton.

It’s a big reason online home goods retailer Wayfair chose ClearSlide, according to Andrew Garcia, local media manager for the company. He runs a small team within Wayfair that sells media to brick and mortar stores that has been using ClearSlide for a couple of years, and he says the ability to know exactly what his prospects are spending time on has been valuable. “We think where ClearSlide wins for us is really as a sales intelligence tool,” he says. “We end up selling smarter. For my sales guys, it’s important to them to know the right time to follow up with their prospects. In the case of ClearSlide, we actually know when prospects have been looking at our email decks. In the old world, you’d have someone maybe badgering you day after day– ‘Did you look at my deck?’ – but now we just know, which is great.”

“And we’re selling more efficiently because we just know what topics to address,” he adds. “We see the prospect looking at a particular slide and say, OK, the prospect is interested in a particular testimonial so we have to be sure to bring that up when we talk to them.” A review of the last six months of sales revealed at least half involved ClearSlide at some time during the process, he notes.

The analytics may win over the cool heads of sales managers, but the product wins the hearts of sales pros in the trenches and their distant prospects with its elegant content sharing, according to Benton. “There’s a little bit more of a warmth to this because you don’t have a lot of technology in the way. It’s just the visuals and the conversation,” he says. The result? No matter the distance, “you feel like you’re just sitting next to somebody.”

ClearSlide users out there, what’s been your personal experience with the platform – have you found any drawbacks?

Image courtesy of ClearSlide.

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Here’s what Apple predicted for its overall results for the January through March period back in late January:

“Looking ahead to the second fiscal quarter of 2012, which will span 13 weeks, we expect revenue of about $32.5 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share of about $8.50.”

Wall Street investors, naturally, are expecting a bit more from the company that always lowballs its forecasts: They are anticipating revenue to be around $36.64 billion for earnings of $9.99 per share.

So how will Apple match — or surpass — that forecast?

The second fiscal quarter had one big new product release: the new iPad. Its sales are likely to be a highlight and provide Apple with a nice boost. While the company sold 4.69 million iPads during the same quarter a year ago, this year the new iPad sold more than half of that total in its very first weekend, with 3 million. Apple also dropped the older model iPad 2 by $100 so it starts at $399. So, expect iPad sales to be a fairly large number: the average estimate from Wall Street analysts is just under 12 million units.

Mac sales have been up for dozens of quarters in a row, but it’s also getting to that time of year where Apple should be refreshing its MacBook and iMac lineup. However, that didn’t happen during the quarter, so it won’t be a huge surprise if unit sales don’t match last quarter’s record-high 5.2 million with potential buyers (sensibly) waiting to upgrade. The quarter in question is also typically a low point in the year for the PC industry in general — it’s after the holidays and still months before graduation and back-to-school shopping. A year ago, 3.76 million Macs were sold. On Tuesday, analysts are expecting a little over 4.5 million sales to be announced.

But again, the key metric influencing Apple’s earnings these days comes down to the iPhone. Sales of the device are what have propelled Apple’s success in the last five years to the top of the tech and business worlds. It’s also what can lead to a major Wall Street freakout: When Apple didn’t meet analysts’ expectations in August thanks to a delayed upgrade cycle of iPhones, there were predictions of the company’s imminent doom. When Apple announced at the end of last quarter that it sold an astonishing 37 million iPhones following the 4S debut in the fall, its stock went on a tear, rising 44.7 percent in just over two months.

So should we be prepared for investors’ handwringing or high-fiving? More likely the latter. Estimates of how many new iPhones Apple sold vary widely, as one might expect. Cannacord Genuity says 32.6 million; JP Morgan is looking for 31.1 million units; Fortune polled 48 analysts that follow Apple and the average estimate was 30.5 million, though the low estimate was 26 million and the highest 33 million.

There was some degree of concern last week after Verizon announced it had activated 3.2 million iPhones, or 26 percent fewer during the last quarter than it did the same quarter a year ago. But, to be fair, was the first quarter that Apple freed the iPhone from AT&T’s exclusivity in the U.S., so there was a bit of pent-up demand back then. And Verizon still sold more iPhones than all of its Android phones combined during that quarter.

Either way, compared to Apple’s iPhone sales the same quarter a year ago (18.65 million) it’s extremely likely this past quarter’s growth is going to be above 50 percent.

Though other new phones that launched during the quarter have had some buzz, like Nokia’s Windows Phone-powered Lumia phones, Nokia has already said sales of the heavily anticipated phones were “mixed.” Samsung, on the other hand, is continuing to charge ahead as Apple’s most significant competitor in smartphone sales. It says it expects to report a record quarter for the same period, and analysts are estimating the Korean electronics maker may have shipped 44 million smartphones between January and March.

We’ll be covering the earnings call at 2 p.m. PT Tuesday, so be sure to come back here then.

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WikiOrgCharts CEO Farhan Memon got the idea for the collaborative org chart while he was working at AOL . During his time there, his team had monthly meetings with external partners. Because they lacked insight into the partners’ knowledge and reporting structure, the AOL group struggled to figure out how best to work with the outside team. A colleague drafted an org chart of the other company, and Memon thought, “this org chart is good, but what I’d really like to do is work with colleagues to fill in the blanks and append information to the org chart.” Having a clearer picture of the roles and relationships makes it easier to know where the bottlenecks are, how decisions are made, and how to manage the underlying connections throughout the project, explained Memon.

Building a wikiorgchart is similar to creating an online family tree. (Memon says that they looked at genealogy websites for user interface inspiration.) You drag a person into position and then use linking lines to show the relationship between people. The privacy settings let you shift from the default of identified contributor to anonymous contributor. When members contribute people and relationships to the org charts, they gain the points they need to do their own searches. (The premium membership does not rely on points.) You can start your own profile by linking to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. This quickly provides information about where you sit in your organization(s), and earns you more points for adding to your profile.

When it comes to getting your resume into the right hands, WikiOrgcharts has some advantages over LinkedIn . Search results on LinkedIn can be limited by a person’s position relative to your existing LinkedIn network and the type of account you have (free versus a variety of paid levels). WikiOrgCharts provides unlimited access to the available information — as long as you have accumulated enough points through participation, or, similar to LinkedIn, have a paid account.

Like Wikipedia, WikiOrgCharts is always growing, but the company has given the site a head start. Said Memon:

We built out the site using a number of different data sources, including social graph information, SEC data, and data from federal government employees. We’ve accumulated 9 million profiles. Our system automates some processes such as bucketing people from different companies, but we’re improving other processes such as sematic matching of companies.

Sensemaking, social intelligence, and the ability to connect are critical skills for modern work. WikiOrgCharts provides a tool to gather the data you need to begin those activities.

Images courtesy of WikiOrgCharts.

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In a note to clients, Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty shared the results of the Alphawise survey, comparing its results to Morgan Stanley’s existing estimates. Based on the survey, she suggests Apple could ship as many as 36 million iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2011, considerably higher than the 28 million predicted by Wall Street. Not only that, but she also says that according to survey data, the iPhone should do even better during the first quarter of 2011, selling as many as 41 million units worldwide.

The iPad stands to gain from the desire expressed by 27 percent of respondents to own a tablet in the near term, something that Huberty believes could put Apple on track to sell 81 million iPads globally in 2012, which is much higher than the 52 million Morgan Stanley was predicting independently of the survey. And if Apple wants to boost sales even further, Huberty estimates that a $100 price cut for the iPad could result in about 15 million more sales worldwide.

Of course, these predictions should be taken with a grain of salt. The Alphawise survey upon which they’re based depends on polling customers for their own opinions; stated intentions and plans about buying electronics at a future date don’t always pan out, and may also have been excessively optimistic since the survey took place immediately following the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, before the year-end cash crunch resulting from holiday shopping really makes its effects felt. Still, the numbers do show that Apple devices are well-positioned among consumers, and developments in the new year like the release of an iPad 3 could definitely propel sales to new lofty heights.

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