Be Wary of Boeing's Dreamliner Excuses

Anyhow, Boeing is all over the business media, this time laying down quotes to the effect that it is not Airbus and that its customers won't mind.

And Boeing could be right. It's trying to do some cool new stuff with this Dreamliner. Maybe it'll all be OK in the end. But when it comes to production delays and a pattern of rolling, replaceable excuses starts to develop, as an investor I'd tread carefully -- even when the business media, those little gullibles, don't.

And now ... two quick trolls for reader responses. When I ran my Apple iPhone jellybean-jar contest, I got more than 500 letters from readers. Uncomfortable with the way iPhone sales estimates were all over creation, I asked readers to guess how many iPhones the company would announce having sold in the last two days of June. I named the contest after Greg Stroh, a Toronto-based reader who suggested it.

Well, I'm still getting email about the iPhone and sales estimates, and Greg suggested a follow-up -- a contest to name the date on which Apple will announce that its 2 millionth iPhone had sold. This is the date it's announced -- not the date it's sold -- and while I want you to have fun with the contest, please remember as an investor that if they have to keep cutting prices to ribbons to get there, it won't be the same quality a benchmark.

But go ahead, send me your wild guesses, and when the time comes, I'll bequeath one of you with the "Greg Stroh Number Two Million" award. The odds-on favorite to win is Chris Hezel, the bright-as-a-bulb tax accountant from Philadelphia who won the first.

Also, I mentioned last week that I will be speaking Saturday at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers fall conference in Chapel Hill, N.C., at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Since I also cover sports, I'll be speaking on the comparative strengths and weaknesses of sports and business coverage. I'd like to include some insights from readers, so if you have some spare thoughts on how you value (or have disdain for) the sports vs. business media, drop me an email. And if you are in Chapel Hill, drop by.

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