We discuss the five characteristics of disruption: Net growth and value creation, inevitability, increased speed of change, necessity for macroeconomic growth, historical consequences. This and much more will form the basis of discussion for Asymconf.
via 5by5 | The Critical Path #29: The Consequences of Disruption.
@mastermmik: love how @asymco thinks of everything and everyone as being “hired” to do something. lol
via Twitter.
Hiring products to do jobs for us is not a difficult cognitive leap to make. But can we extend the metaphor to “everything and everyone?” Aren’t there parts of the human experience that are outside the realm of the implied trade that hiring suggests?
Of course there are.
Continue reading “[Asymconf] What are the jobs that the entertainment industry is hired to do?”
The phenomenon we call business disruption could benefit from a different name. Although it signifies a disturbance or an interruption in an industry, it’s much more than that.
The nominal definition I work with is that disruption is the “transfer of wealth in an industry from dominant incumbents to disadvantaged entrants.” It’s a convenient definition because it’s brief, it puts the emphasis on economic value and because it alludes to a reversal of fortune and the implied extraordinariness.
However, there are several nuances lost and contradictions ignored in this definition. I want to enumerate them here and now:
I’ve offered examples of these consequences or side-effects of disruption but I’ll emphasize once more the example I’m most familiar with. To illustrate the primary definition, the AMP index is a measure of the success of one company relative to a set of peers in the mobile phone industry. It’s the average of four market shares: mobile phone units, smartphone units, revenues and operating profits.
This chart shows the shift in AMP index values for the competitors whose data is public and which make up the vast majority of units sold: Continue reading “What is disruption and how can it be harnessed?[1]”
Regarding the recently proposed Reception and workshop at the Apple Investor Summit, registration is now open.
You can purchase tickets here: asymco-workshop
Details and venue:
Time: 6:30 PM Thursday, March 15th
Location: Room 511, Los Angeles Convention Center, West Hall (across from the Ballroom).
At last year’s iPad 2 launch, I compared the specs of the newly announced iPad with those of a laptop and desktop from five years earlier. This year I am comparing the new iPad with Apple’s computers from four years earlier:
The new iPad now exceeds the total display resolution, has similar speed and storage capacity while having twice the battery life of the thinnest laptop of four years ago. It also has very high quality cameras and GPS and cellular network connectivity which have yet to appear on mainstream PCs. It’s still a lot smaller and half the price and has a larger selection of available software titles at prices a fraction of its elder cousin.
Continue reading “The new feeds and speeds: iPad vs. MacBook Air and iMac”
Dan Benjamin is joined by Marco Arment of Instapaper.com and Horace Dediu of Asymco.com to discuss the just-announced Apple iPad 3rd Generation.
via 5by5 | 5by5 Specials #5: Fat Wireless: iPad 3rd Generation.
Horace interviews writer/producer Dan Abrams. Dan talks us through the budgets and cost structures of independent movies as well as the obstacles to innovation presented by the current industry structure. We talk about some of the new concepts that are emerging as means to overcome these obstacles. We also talk about new forms of distribution and financing that enable long-tail film and TV content. Dan also talks about his upcoming mockumentary about the Global Financial Crisis (www.falseprofitthemovie.com).
The latest comScore US mobile subscriber monthly data is in: comScore Reports January 2012 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share – comScore, Inc.
January saw a return to trend line growth in US smartphone add rates. The 767k/week rate is within the band after November’s below- and December’s above-the-line outliers. The weekly add rates are shown (with projection of trend) below:
The pattern shows a likely 1 million new smartphone users per week being added consistently by the fourth quarter of this year.
Overall, penetration of the sampled population (above age of 13, primary phone and excluding business purchases in the US) reached Continue reading “The unrelenting trends in the US smartphone market”
This is a reminder that I will be speaking at the Apple Investor Summit on March 15th at the Los Angeles Convention Center. My topic will be Apple’s capital expenditure structure and how that foretells strategy. I will present previously unpublished data and review the likely scenarios for 2012 iOS device production. As I prepared it I realized that with only 45 minutes there is a limited amount of detail I can provide.
To remedy that and to offer an opportunity to have a detailed question and answer session on related topics, I decided to offer a workshop-like reception at the end of the day. The time would be around 6:30 PM on the 15th and last at most two hours. The location will be in the vicinity of the LA Convention Center.
If you are interested in participating, please let me know so I can decide the type of venue to rent. Please also note that there will be a cost involved and pricing will depend on the number of participants. My current estimate is that the price will be $150 per person.
We’ve been very, very focused on China. China, we’ve had incredible success with iPhone. Over the past few years, we’ve gone from a few hundred million dollars of revenue in greater China, to last year $13 billion. So we really’ve been focused on trying to understand the market there and then taking those learnings to other markets. As it turns out–and not very many people agree with me on this, probably–but what I see is that there’s a lot of commonality in what people around the world want.
Transcript: Apple CEO Tim Cook at Goldman Sachs – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech
People do want the same things globally, but due to various constraints they typically don’t get the same things at the same time.
One of the most important constraints on the purchase of iPhones is the state of 3G (or, more broadly, mobile broadband) networks. An iPhone is a mobile computer whose primary value is derived from high bandwidth data communication. Because this bandwidth is not universally available, the iPhone faces a restricted addressable market.
The good news is that 3G networks are being adopted very quickly. The International Telecommunications Union reports that 20% of mobile users have “active subscriptions to mobile broadband” (1.2 billion out of 6 billion). That’s encouraging but the subscription rate varies widely by country. Ideally we should look at the data on a country-by-country basis.
To start, I took a look at two countries which may form an interesting sample: the US and China. The following chart shows the subscriber structure in the two countries grouped by 2G/3G subscription and by operator.
The two left-most columns represent nominally addressable iPhone markets. The two right-most columns represent currently unaddressable markets. Note that
Asymmetric Competition