Apple has sold 700 million iOS devices. Google claims one billion Android device activations. Microsoft has about 1.5 billion Windows users and Facebook about 1.19 billion. LinkedIn has 259 million users and Twitter has 232 million. Amazon has 215 active account holders and PayPal 137 million. Markets place a value on these users implicitly when … Continue reading “What’s an Active User worth?”
The graph below shows the Revenue and Operating Income for a select group of companies. The large numbers represent the share price to earnings (trailing twelve months) ratio (P/E or PE ratio). Of course the P/E ratio hides a lot of subtlety. It mostly fails to account for the fact that earnings are largely a … Continue reading “How many years does Apple have?”
During the first quarter of fiscal year 2014, we changed our organizational structure as part of our transformation to a devices and services company. As a result of these changes, information that our chief operating decision maker regularly reviews for purposes of allocating resources and assessing performance changed. Therefore, beginning in fiscal year 2014, we … Continue reading “The newly integrated company”
Apple’s latest product launch (new OSX, iPads, Macs and iWork/iLife) came with a change in pricing for software. OS X and iWork and iLife and updates are now made available free on new Macs and, in the case of the suites, on iOS devices as well. Recall also that iOS updates are now free as … Continue reading “The value of zero-priced software”
Gartner reported that PC shipments totaled 80.3 million units in Q3. Subtracting an estimated 4.4 million Macs yields an estimated 75.9 million Windows PCs.1 This total is lower than the total shipped in the same period of 2008. The graphs above show the The total will be less than this as some PCs … Continue reading “The Five Year Plan”
One of the curiosities of the mobile phone market is how vast it is but also how heterogeneous it has always been. I wrote about this in 2010: Smartphone parochialism: How operator policies prevent or promote platform adoption. This observation was influenced by my time at Nokia where I became amazed at how differently users … Continue reading “Think local, act global”
When looking at the Race to a Billion data I noticed that some platform adoption ramps look quite different from others. It’s not just a matter of “slope” or rate of growth but a distinctly different shape. If you look at the graph below you might see the difference yourself. First, note that the graph … Continue reading “A new platform classification”
In the “Race to a Billion” there is a graph showing Android reported activations and iOS cumulative unit sales alongside cumulative console sales. The contrast between mobile phone platforms and game consoles is striking, with an order of magnitude difference in consumption. The best performing console to date is the Wii with about 100 million … Continue reading “Game over”
Android is the third platform to reach a billion users1 . The first was Windows and the second was Facebook. Apple sold around 650 to 700 million iOS and is expected to be the fourth to a billion sometime next year.2 If we define the Race To a Billion to be bounded by a time … Continue reading “Third to a billion”
In February I asked Why doesn’t anybody copy Apple? Put another way: Why is it that everyone wants to copy Apple’s products but nobody wants to copy being Apple? Being Apple means, at least: Insourcing all aspects of operations which affect the customer experience. Increasingly that has meant insourcing everything, a toxic idea to every MBA-trained … Continue reading “Who's next?”
