[The following was originally published on LinkedIn.] The US is in the forefront of smartphone usage. This has not always been the case. Five years ago only 3 percent of US phone users were using a smartphone, lower than the global average. At the time Palm and BlackBerry were the prominent devices in the US while in … Continue reading “The Crucible of the Phone Market”
Quarterly financial data is often a lagging indicator of strategic success. RIM’s vital signs were exceptionally strong up until early 2011. Consider the following graph showing RIM’s device growth. Using language commonly heard among analysts, one would say that the company was “reverting to the mean” and growing nearly in-line with the market. In other … Continue reading “Reverting to the mean”
Horace and Moisés discuss the early consumer response to iOS 6 (Maps in particular), and how people appear to greatly prefer native apps to their web app counterparts. They also dig into just how large an opportunity cost Apple is capable of absorbing in the interest of protecting their platform. In doing so, they examine … Continue reading “5by5 | The Critical Path #55: Gravity Well”
It looks like the next iPhone will be called the iPhone 5. What’s in a name? As it turns out, quite a lot. Every hardware product that Apple has released has had a brand and a sub-brand. Macs for example use the Mac brand and a sub-brand as follows: iMac Mac Pro Mac mini MacBook … Continue reading “5”
We can put all of our products on the table you’re sitting at. Those products together sell $40 billion per year. No other company can make that claim except perhaps an oil company. We are the most focused company that I know of, or have read of, or have any knowledge of. We say no … Continue reading “Think small”
“It’s costly and has unpredictable consequences. That makes it a very bad business model. I suppose both companies have agendas that are not visible in court and perhaps Apple is signaling to other parties, and perhaps Samsung is using it to raise its profile. It still seems that unintended consequences may arise and the result … Continue reading “It’s costly and has unpredictable consequences”
The second quarter showed continuing growth for Android with 19 points of share growth from a year ago. Only Windows Phone showed a gain y/y in share up 1.6 points to about 3%. In the same time, Bada lost half a point, iOS lost 2.1 points, RIM lost 7.2, Symbian 11.4. The result is shown … Continue reading “American exceptionalism”
50.2 million. That’s the estimate from IDC. So why bother asking? Because that is an estimate. Of the 104 million Android phones shipped in the quarter (itself an estimate from another, possibly different methodology), I could only account for 7 million actually reported. That figure comes from a close reading of an investor presentation from … Continue reading “How many smartphones did Samsung ship in Q2?”
In a footnote to my last post on Apple Retail (The face and the brand) I used data on operating performance from Apple and an assumption about employee salaries (which turned out to be low) to estimate that about 7% of Apple store sales are spent on “cost of service” or the operational expenses, which … Continue reading “Apple Store Operational Economics”
Horace takes another look at the aviation industry and asks whatever happened to air taxis. Then we go back to the manufacturing miracle of WWII in order to ask what might be the limits to growth. That helps us describe the “top down” opportunity for iOS and mobile computing in general looking at the overall … Continue reading “5by5 | The Critical Path #49: Fly me to the Moon”
