The end of exclusivity doesn't change the price operators pay for the iPhone

AT&T does not pay a higher price for iPhone exclusivity | asymco.

At the risk of repetition, there are three instances in conference calls that Apple management has stated that the iPhone has a fixed price for all operators and resellers.

The first was in October 20, 2009:

“So when you go from exclusive to multiple, you don’t change the charge to the carrier?”

Cook answered: “Correct.”

The second was a year later, October 18, 2010: Continue reading “The end of exclusivity doesn't change the price operators pay for the iPhone”

How exclusivity distorted the US smartphone market

Here’s a wonderful chart from The New York Times:

Will Apple Put the iPhone on Other Carriers? – NYTimes.com.

Although the population of Android users is near in size to the population of iPhone users, the concentration in one carrier shows how distribution agreements hamstring platform choice. Continue reading “How exclusivity distorted the US smartphone market”

65% of Apple's sales came from iOS powered devices

The iPhone and iPad generated $15 billion of revenue last quarter. In addition, iPod touch generated about $2.3 billion, implying that iOS based devices were responsible for sales of $17.3 billion.

To put that in perspective I drew this chart which shows not only the sales by products but a rough representation of share of the two OS variants Apple uses to power its products.

Continue reading “65% of Apple's sales came from iOS powered devices”

Why Eric Schmidt had to go: Google's innovation dilemma

Charles Arthur provides a convincing back-story to the Google exec re-shuffle.

Google shuffle: why Eric Schmidt had to be pushed from the top | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

There is evidence of execution failure and indecision or muddled messages to stakeholders. Shared leadership arrangements never end well.

But in this forum I’ve been critical of their strategy. Though I’ll be the first to admit that such criticism is not founded on data but on intuition, strategy is always made in a vacuum of data. It is just an unfortunate fact of life that we don’t have data about the future.

But what data we do have is about the past and it shows the contrast between Apple and Google.

As a sample, let’s look at the performance in the last quarter: Continue reading “Why Eric Schmidt had to go: Google's innovation dilemma”