[Updated with Mac OS versions. See footnote 3.] I’m glad Windows 8 is named the way it is. With Windows 7 Microsoft went to a numbering system which is much more rational than the mixed naming of the past. The number 8 actually corresponds to the actual sequential number of major versions of Windows released … Continue reading “OS turning circles: Questioning Windows' maneuverability”
The question of low end disruption should be a concern to any manager. It’s one of the most important sources of growth and has led to a vast amount of wealth creation. Apple was an early low end disruptor by selling personal computers at a fraction of mini-computer prices. Toyota also offered “cheap” cars as … Continue reading “The case for the iPad's future”
The violence with which new platforms have displaced incumbent mobile vendor fortunes continues to surprise. Nokia’s Symbian platform has gone from 47% share to 16% in three years Microsoft’s phone platforms have gone from 12% to 1% Other platforms have gone from 21% to zero Although far less dramatic, RIM’s decline from 17% to 12% … Continue reading “The fate of mobile phone brands”
When Apple changed its name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc. they signaled that their business has moved on. We can say it’s to devices or to mobile computing or to the Post-PC era. To understand that this is not a shift driven only by wishful thinking we can plot the change in volumes for … Continue reading “Apple has moved on”
Apple’s second calendar quarter was a record breaking performance. This is surprising because it shows super-seasonal performance. For as long as I can remember the fourth calendar quarter (i.e. holiday) was always the strongest quarter, by a large margin. This quarter was higher than the last holiday quarter. A glance at the following chart shows … Continue reading “Apple's growth scorecard for second quarter 2011”
Almost all valuation models for Apple assume it’s a hardware company. The modeling algorithm for hardware is simple: For each year in near future For each product line Compute contribution Determine company value by summing contributions and multiplying by a P/E ratio The major difficulty is in predicting the growth of each product line. This … Continue reading “A new way to value Apple”
In the last two weeks we received two more data points which allow an update to the “race to a billion” platform growth trajectories. Android reached 130 million active users and iOS reached 200 million. The updated picture looks like this: Note again that this is a log scale graph. Every major horizontal gridline is … Continue reading “The Frontiers of Platform Adoption”
Steve Ballmer stated and Andy Lees confirmed that Microsoft views iPad and other tablets as “just PCs”. From a market measurement point of view Canalys agrees. IDC and Gartner don’t, calling the new devices “media tablets.” Before deciding whether tablets belong with PCs in market metrics, it would be interesting to look at what the … Continue reading “Is the tablet computer a new PC or post-PC?”
The following chart shows the net gains in users for the major mobile platforms in the US. The data is derived from comScore’s MobiLens report. The raw numbers for the last period (ending May) are:
About 10 years ago I met an advertising executive in New York who explained the difficulty of advertising a new brand of deodorant to consumers. “Most people never change their deodorant,” I remember him saying. “They pick one brand when they are young, and stick with it for a long, long time. If it works, … Continue reading “The Android (in)adequacy: How to tell if a platform is good enough”
