According to a news item in the Financial Times, upmarket retailers here in the U.K. outperformed others in the industry during the Christmas period.

In “So Long Apple Nay Sayers”, Om Malik highlights the difference in performance between Apple and Dell, where Apple plays the role of the upmarket retailer.

Apple invests large sums in product design and with creative talents such as Jonathan Ive on board, its products seem more like designer wear than hardware. Business Week dissected the Apple Nano recently and estimated that before marketing and distribution costs, the profit margin on the Nano is around 50%.

So which business model is more volatile: Apple with its high end designer-ware or Dell with four times more sales of affordable but slightly dull products?

Instinctively one might say that Apple is more volatile since its revenues are subject to fashion trends, which can be fickle. But both are subject to general economic trends and in the U.K., where the economy is slowing down, it seems that Dell-like business models suffer while the Apple-like upmarket ones continue to prosper.

It’s interesting to compare the amount of buzz surrounding two very prominent “web as a platform” companies; Salesforce on one hand and 37signals on the other.

Technorati and Google blogsearch reveal that 37signals seems to be getting more of a buzz in the blog world than Salesforce.

This is notable since Salesforce went public in 2004 and is valued at over 4 billion dollars while 37signals is a small outfit with seven employees.

This is either the Rails effect or 37signals’ customers are more likely to be bloggers.

Another and possibly more reasonable picture emerges with Icerocket’s excellent trend tracker:

By the way: Technorati keeps telling me to “try again in a minute or two” due to a “a high volume of requests”. Does this support Techcrunch’s theory that they are in need of funding?

This is the first post in the Snailbyte weblog. In this blog we will publish news about the company, our products and general thoughts on anything technology related.