When trying to assess the success of an ecosystem, the primary measure is the size of the user base or the “audience” for the product. Companies like FaceBook and WhatsApp and Twitter are measured first and foremost on this metric. Companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are less so. When revenues are firmly attached … Continue reading “Tim Cook’s outburst [Updated]”
During the latest shareholder meeting Tim Cook revealed that Apple TV sales were above $1 billion in the last fiscal year (ending September 2013). The company later clarified that this figure includes device and content sales. This poses a problem. In previous statements the company cited device (unit) shipments rather than value. The statements made … Continue reading “The billion dollar hobby”
Prior to Apple’s earnings report I read at least one article suggesting that the most important indicator to watch was Apple’s margin. I suppose this was due to a recent decline in margins from a peak gross margin of 47.4% in Q1 2012 to 36.7%. As the graph below shows, margins began to recover by … Continue reading “A margin of error”
Horace Dediu and Guy English discuss the future of TV, how we consume media, and the fate of console-style devices. From Apple to Nintendo and beyond, is there one box to rule them all, or can there be? Interview segment: Cinematographer Barry Braverman talks about working with director Wes Anderson (uncut version to be posted … Continue reading “Electric Shadow 1: Bicycle for the Mind”
The increase in net sales of iTunes, Software and Services in the first quarter of 2014 compared to the first quarter of 2013 was due to growth in net sales from the iTunes Store, AppleCare and licensing. The iTunes Store generated a total of $2.4 billion in net sales during the first quarter of 2014 … Continue reading “Fortune 130”
In 2013 there were 18.8 times more Windows PCs sold than Macs. This is a reduction in the Windows advantage from about 19.8x in 2012. This decline is mostly due to the more rapid decline in Windows PC shipments relative to the more modest decline in Mac unit shipments. Gartner estimates that about 309 million … Continue reading “When Apple reached parity with Windows”
GSMA Intelligence reports provide valuable statistics on the growth of mobile networks. One in particular shows the history of regional smartphone penetration. I took the historic data and plotted it as follows: Note that I chose to model using the same logistic function that I have used to describe the US market (as measured by … Continue reading “When will smartphones saturate?”
When describing the process of disruptive innovation, Clay Christensen set about to also describe the process by which a technology is developed by visionaries in a commercially unsuccessful way. He called it cramming. Cramming is a process of trying to make a not-yet-good-enough technology great without allowing it to be bad. In other words, it’s … Continue reading “Moonshot”
IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark (report is here) has published, for the fourth year in a row, US online shopping traffic data with a split between mobile and fixed online traffic. It reveals a pattern of consumer behavior which is quite startling: people seem to prefer to shop using mobile devices. The data is shown below:
In the post Seeing What’s Next, I showed how the rate of change of adoption of technology varies with time and asked what might be experienced by present and future generations. It turns out that knowing how what innovations become universal and the speed at which these technologies are replaced can give us an idea … Continue reading “A way to measure one’s life”
