 Welcome to News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV for Wednesday, October 17th, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. Apple has made news in something other than the iPhone 5. Intel and IBM have released their third quarter earnings, so how did they fare? Join us now with his breaking analysis on these stories as SiliconANGLE founder, John Furrier. Welcome, John. Hello, how are you? Doing good. So last night, the presidential debates were broadcast yet again on every conceivable new media device. So it only seems fitting that they brought up the U.S. tech industry in the debates. Even in an election cycle focused on the economy and foreign policy, shouldn't tech policy play a central role in this election? Yeah, I think, I mean, I watched the debate yesterday, so obviously my political commentary is, you know, Obama definitely came out swinging. And it was interesting, during one of Obama's monologues, where he's basically memorizing his speech, he mentioned, talked about immigration, and he mentions Intel and Google. And last time I checked, they weren't really started by immigrants, illegal immigrants. They were started by Americans. That was an interesting gaffe there that no one picked up on. But social media, again, drives this. And what I love about the election on a geek side of it is that Fox News and all the CNN, they go to Twitter for the results. And Twitter is just bombarded with spam. The spam bots took over last night. And so one report and some of the things that we're seeing is about 1% of the tweets represented, you know, 1% of the people represented 46% of the tweets. So, you know, that's interesting to see that how Twitter is now shaping the kind of the crowd. And, you know, we're interested in that whole business at a silicon angle. But from a presidential standpoint, I thought, you know, I still like Romney over Obama and I'll tell you why Romney wins on the economics. He clearly has a handle on the economics. Obama looks like a deer in the headlights anytime you talk about economics or economy. And it's obvious he's being scripted. On social issues, Obama totally trumps Romney. Romney is, again, comes across as a, you know, right, hard right wing or trying to go to the middle. And ultimately, he's not that strong socially. But I don't think that matters because I think the country is so divided that no matter who the president is, they really can't move the needle. In terms of affecting any radical change at the social level. So I don't think that's an issue. However, you know, there is one party, you know, red and blue or split 50-50 in the U.S. But there's one party that's 100% American and that's the green party of money. And the business side of the market is really, really interesting. And no one is paying attention to this in that entrepreneurship is now growing so fast that the quote middle class, if you will, is transitioning. And it's going to be small, medium-sized businesses are technology driven. And that's where the tax relief really is needed. And I think Obama clearly has no clue about what's going on in that particular segment. So that's a particularly interest to me. I give Obama higher marks in Romney on net neutrality and other funding around science and technology. So it's an interesting election. You know, it's a toss-up either way, but I would have to lean towards Romney at this point, given the economic issues. During the debate, Apple was the company that was brought up by one of the audience members in their questions to the presidential candidates. Let me ask you the question that was posed to them. Apple and other companies, do they're manufacturing in China? Are those manufacturing jobs coming back? And more importantly, should they? Are they coming back? Not in the near future. I don't think they're coming back. And I think the issue is they should come back. I think Apple and any other big company in America is going to look for the best economic benefit for their company. And they're already being squeezed in taxes. Actually, Apple and HP are still two big companies here in California. And we've had Scott McNeely on a SiliconANGLE TV interview where he said, I would never, ever start a company in California. And he said, quote, if I was starting Sun Microsystems today, it would fail because of the government taxes. And that's a huge problem. So one, you know, you're referring to Foxconn and other issues around Apple. Yeah, I mean, just cheaper labor there. And they do it that way. Now, I think it can come back. If the government is smart, they'll offer incentives. I mean, at the end of the day, it's about economics. And it's a cost issue for these companies. So I'm sure Apple would love to have a Made in the USA label for the US customers. But that's just clearly not happening right now. Now that Apple has been exposed on a national stage, do you think they'll be more likely to take action regarding their outsourcing? No, I mean, I think, first of all, Apple and a lot of these companies to get scolded, especially Intel. Intel has a lot of manufacturing here still in the U.S. And they've been in Ireland. So they've gotten kudos for that. No one really gives them a lot of praise for that. The same with Apple. They have data centers all over the U.S. That's the new manufacturing. These data factories, as we call it on theCUBE, is really the future. So Apple's not like it's like running away from the U.S. That's relative to only manufacturing where labor costs are much lower. It's significantly lower. They have to go there. So when you look at the economic impact of profitability, it is the path of least resistance relative to the economics. However, if there was an alternative in the U.S., I'm sure they'd be here. With all the other aspects of tech like big data and media disclosure that are facing regulation from the U.S. government, is where Apple's manufacturing taking place the most important tech issue that our elected officials should be tackling? I don't think so. I think it's a global macroeconomic issue around incentives for business. And this is where Obama and Mitt Romney completely differ in my opinion. Obama systematically wants to move money from the wealthy and feed the poor. That's his whole socialism-like stance that he's been criticized for. That's just me. That's just what other people are saying. What Mitt Romney is doing is saying, listen, if you have robust business, everything will win in the middle class. However, you have to provide tax relief. I agree with him that the tax relief in the middle class is the right way to go. And having companies have robust job creation starts with the top. Now, at the bottom, you can do all kinds of cool social programs around net neutrality and offering educational grants. That's the real issue in tech is that new technology, big data, whether it's education, is an enabler for a radical change. And that's what no one is focused on. So to me, the core tech issue is obviously the tech economy, which is not just the computer industry. It's every industry. If you look at big data, retail, oil and gas, financial, web, everything is impacted by technology. And there's no discussion of that. On the media business, we're seeing massive disruption with broadcast and television. We commented about that yesterday. That's going through massive disruption. All the common elements here is about technology. And neither president addressed that. I would say Romney is more savvy, but Obama has also been very generous with science grants. So, you know, that's a tough one. Speaking of the tech economy, Intel and IBM released their third quarter earnings yesterday. Let's talk about IBM first. How did they do? IBM actually had good earnings. They meet the estimates. My numbers here are close to 25 billion in revenue, about $4 billion in net income or profit. And IBM essentially met and exceeded all expectations. They didn't blow away Wall Street, but they had some currency fluctuations that was a core part of their numbers. IBM is a massive company. I think they did great. I think they're well positioned. We're going to be at IBM's big information on demand conference Sunday through Tuesday, doing our live broadcast here on SiliconANGLE.tv. So look for us there. But IBM is well positioned. They absolutely have great business focus. The Smarter Planets, their ad campaign. They're doing some real work in the storage area. Look for advancements around storage. A kind of a smaller group of IBM, now moving into the mainstream. And at the end of the day, IBM is really, really well positioned for the big data business, because we've all seen Watson, you know, play Jeopardy and do all these cool things. IBM actually is really well positioned for cloud, mobile and social. So I see IBM as a really bright future. It looked like when their individual business units are analyzed that business analytics made a huge jump with revenue up 14% year to date. What's the big data angle here? The big data angle is that IBM absolutely has both core technology, products and services that directly relate to big data. And that's traditional computer services. IBM's core competency is in all three areas. So you couldn't ask for a better trend for IBM as a company, because all those things line up and it's the number one demand in the marketplace right now for products and services. That's big data analytics. That's where companies are using their computer systems. They're connected mobile devices through, like say cloud computing to actually use data to change their business for real time. And that's something that a lot of folks in the press aren't talking about as much, but real time business is about analytics and dashboards of what's happening, whether it's inventory, customer support, marketplace information, all that real time information was actually never, ever captureable for business. And now it is, and that's transforming businesses in a radical positive way, and that's going to change and transform our business landscape over the next 20 years. Let's turn to Intel quickly. They beat Wall Street expectations, but these expectations had been lowered by analysts after they were warned of declining sales in the last month. Any insight from the financial data? Yeah, well, I mean, I have some insight and some perspective on that one. I think Intel's getting a little bit hammered here that they, it's unwarranted. Really, what everyone's looking at is the fact that Windows 8 was delayed. So we were at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco doing the CUBE interviews and talking to their top executives and top scientists. And Intel is a very, very well positioned. However, in the short term, like in the past couple, past quarter, they were heard from a number standpoint relative to two things. The PC tablet war that's going on, obviously Apple and Android are front and center. Microsoft's going to announce their own version with this Surface product. There's so much going on in that PC market. It's under massive transition, highly competitive penetration pricing. I mean, the consumers are winning, but that's causing a lot of fud for Intel's, you know, traditional PC business. So the PC business is under radical transformation. And two, Windows 8 was delayed. That's a key driver of Intel's core business and everything drives around that. The positive about Intel that people aren't watching is that with cloud computing and mobile and high performance computing, Intel is absolutely doing extremely well, growing very, very fast in areas like storage, for example, which is now integrated into the data center unit. I think you're going to see Intel really sore around data center, cloud, mobile, and certainly high performance computing because of things we were just talking about, big data analytics. These kinds of new expectations, these new computing environments are demanding new kinds of solutions and chips and technology. That's a shift from these centralized PC to a much more distributed computing environment. That's where Intel's positioned. That's clearly where their tech is going. So I look at this short term bump from Intel, nothing more than just a small little transition. Maybe a little speed bump in the way, but ultimately Intel is right on the right path. Towards this new concept of computing. Well, John, it looks like that's our time for today, but thanks for your commentary and we'll talk with you soon. Okay. For in-depth coverage on news of the day and the latest breaking analysis, join us daily at Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE.tv.