As I remember it, at least 10 years ago, I began to hear anecdotes from developers who built apps for both iOS and Android about their economics. The story is that they tended to have twice as many users using Android but that iPhone App Store revenues were roughly twice those of Google Play Store. … Continue reading “The Value of a Customer”
Almost a year ago, on March 1st, 2021, I tweeted a snapshot of the “FAANG” P/E ratios. They were: Netflix: 88.63 Amazon: 73.94 Microsoft: 34.65 Google: 34.75 Apple: 32.89 Facebook: 25.53 Today same companies have the following ratios: Netflix: 19.34 Amazon: 46.08 Microsoft: 30.17 Google: 22.35 Apple: 27.79 Facebook: 13.67 What a difference 13 months … Continue reading “Movies and the Internet”
This is a transcript of an Asymetric podcast. It was lightly edited for legibility. Judd Rubin: Three continents, one conversation, this is Asymetric. We are very excited to have Balaji Srinivasan with us today. Balaji, you’re a busy man, Horace you’re on the run as usual, so why don’t we dive right in. Thanks for … Continue reading “Asymetric: The Crypto Plan for World Domination. An Interview with Balaji Srinivasan”
Five years ago I used the Cook Doctrine (put forward 12 years ago) to assess the possibility of Apple’s entry in the car market. That doctrine states, among other things: We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can … Continue reading “Significant Contribution Again”
In March 2016 Ben Bajarin and I put on an event called SUBSCRIBE where we asked, among other things, How will the online services business models evolve? How will hardware affect software and services and vice versa? How will users, usage, and capital connect? Now is a good time to look back on that event. … Continue reading “Subscribe Again”
About a year and a half ago in Lasts Longer I noted that “keeping iPhones in use” became a top priority for Apple’s design for sustainability. I considered this provocative because it prioritizes usage and users over units sold, in contrast to how the company was perceived by investors. This new focus was reinforced by … Continue reading “Lasts Longer (2.0)”
There is no such thing as a free internet. If you engage online you are being monitored and someone is looking to extract data from your actions. Your online life is under constant surveillance from social networks, data brokers, ad companies and others looking to “monetize” your actions. You don’t have to accept this. IVPN … Continue reading “[Sponsor] IVPN: Your Trustworthy VPN”
WWDC 2019 included a vast list of releases and it’s quite difficult to summarize. The focus is always on software updates but this year the list seems more exhaustive than usual. The highlights for me are: WatchOS now includes direct App Store access. This continues the separation of the Watch from the iPhone, on a … Continue reading “The iPad Operating System”
The iPhone is the most successful product of all time. Over 1.6 billion have been sold. Including the iOS products it spun off, the total is over 2.2 billion. Of those 2.2 billion sold, 1.5 billion are still in use. There are about 1 billion iPhone users. Economically speaking, iPhone sales have reached one trillion … Continue reading “The Pivot”
In the latest Apple Earnings report, Apple announced a few details that are relevant to the forecast of the business: The global active installed base for iPhone reached an all-time high at the end of December, surpassing 900 million devices. This represents growth y-o-y in each of five geographic segments, and growth of almost 75 … Continue reading “A Billion Users”
