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The Critical Path #113: Takt Time

Mar 7, ’14 1:23 AM
Author Categories Podcast

We talk about CarPlay, MWC2014, Microsoft and Nokia, “Tim Cook’s outburst”, per-user value, and re-evaluating how we analyze companies in tech.

via 5by5 | The Critical Path #113: Takt Time.

  • HM

    You say in the podcast that it is unlikely that carplay would receive information from the car but demo videos do show that it receives information from the car such as temperature as well as the status of the climate control settings and heated seat and can in return control certain aspects of the vehicle’s functions.

    The designs that we are seeing in the demo videos all seem to show concepts where all physical buttons, knobs and switches are substituted by the carplay screen which would imply that carplay does indeed replace those functions.

    Granted this is not mechanical and diagnostic information which you might have been referring to.

    Also, based on the 2013 WWDC list of manufacturers not only is Volkswagen absent but also all members of the VAG group and this might be due to their heavy involvement with the VAGCOM/VCDS system.

  • Horace, you nailed it with your comment about the double-standard in regard Apple.

    iMessage and iTunes are just two of Apple’s strengths that are not rewarded by the Market in the same way its peers are rewarded. (Although today’s Market is responding positively to the news that iTunes Radio is now ahead of Spotify less than a year after its launch.)

    The other factor the Market doesn’t seem to attribute any value to is the customer-experience that Apple has painstakingly cultivated over the last fifteen years or so (see Jobs’s efforts to remain at the top of JD Powers’ rankings).

    If Google, Samsung, Microsoft or any other competitor were to attempt to replicate this, it would take a huge investment of both time and resources.

  • stefnagel

    About that outburst. As Apple approaches a billion users, the per-user valuation grows in importance as an index. But we need more definition than value measured in dollars. The commitment of willingly handing over real bucks for a product (and even letting a company hold onto your credit card) signals an increase in intentionality. These folks are not free loaders in the literal sense of that term. Tho’ intentionality means nothing to Wall Street, it does to Apple’s planners I betcha.

    Here’s a definition of an intentional community: “An intentional community is a planned residential community designed from the start to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision and often follow an alternative lifestyle.”

    I don’t pretend these attributes attach to folks using Apple products; it is not a religion. But at a billion users, we need to think about what more intentionality individually, at enormous scale, brings to the table: What services? products? support? How do we even talk about it? Maybe the billion is on Tim’s mind too.