What value have the carriers brought? Seriously. What software on Android phones have the carriers added that’s any good at all?
Things you don’t hear iPhone users say: “Man, this iPhone would be even better if my carrier could ‘add value’ to it.”
via Daring Fireball Linked List: Andy Rubin Talks Android.
Good questions. I would seriously like to hear any answers to these questions as I have never used any of these operator software phones.
Now that NYT and WSJ were both tipped off about the coming of a CDMA iPhone, I think it’s a safe bet. Is this significant? What is the CDMA addressable market?
Here is a chart showing for the “CDMA 3G” subscribers (source: CDMA Development Group.) Continue reading “Adding CDMA increases iPhone addressable market by 16 percent”
Before proclaiming the death of a company or product it’s important to understand what makes it live. I’ll illustrate with a personal experience.
I was once asked to comment on a product designed to be a “Blackberry killer”. Much like the latest Droid Pro, the product looked like a Blackberry. It had a monoblock keyboard and a nearly square screen. It was, in other words, a product designed for thumb typing emails.
The backstory is that, like many phones, the requirements came from operators. At the time, Continue reading “The imminent demise of killers”
Adobe is one of the last surviving desktop software companies. So is Microsoft. Consolidation happens when an industry matures and excess capacity and excess overhead can be squeezed out of the value chain, giving a temporary burst of earnings growth.
So, in this way of thinking, recognizing that the sun is setting on desktop software, a merger of old schools of thought may make sense. Rather like Sun and Oracle or HP and Compaq.
But then a lot of other things make more sense. Like both companies trying to expand into new growth areas. Like Microsoft talking to RIM or Adobe developing tools for HTML5. Adobe’s cash cow products are not going anywhere without a deep reset. Same is true for Microsoft. They will both face these challenges whether standing alone or together.
There would be nothing strange about a Microsoft Adobe merger, but there would be nothing great about it either.
How do you think about the iPhone 3GS after the iPhone 4 is out? I have a hypothesis that it’s not what it seems.
The standard logic is that the 3GS (which I will call the n-1 where n is the current phone version) is a lower-priced leftover that covers a lower price point and expands the market.
I think it’s designed to give the illusion that the iPhone 4 is actually more desirable steering more potential buyers to the new (nth) phone.
To illustrate I’m going to call upon the wonderful example given by behavioral economist Dan Ariely at the TED talks. Continue reading “The cognitive illusion that is iPhone n-1”
“In all areas of software development, mobile computing is seen as the number-one hottest IT opportunity next year,” said Jim Corgel, an IBM general manager of independent software vendors and developer relations who was involved in the survey. “Not only will mobile spike to the forefront, but by 2015, respondents said it will dominate everything. The cell phone is no longer a gadget – it’s what IT is going to become.”
via IBM Survey Says Mobile Apps Will Dominate Enterprise – Venture Capital Dispatch – WSJ.
Developers are usually not very good at predicting specific business winners or losers (to prove this consider why developers don’t spend their energy and earn their living picking tech stocks instead of writing code.)
However, developers are very good at spotting long term technology trends. It was developers who championed the early internet and it was developers who saw potential in social networking. To see a survey of developers confirm that mobile devices will dominate IT, in contradiction to most incumbent strategies, is encouraging.
The contact, says [Ticonderoga’s] White, shipped more than 6 million parts to Apple during the third quarter of the year and expects to ship 7 million more in the fourth quarter.
Since Apple uses one unit of this particular component in each iPad, that adds up to shipments of 13 million iPads in the second half of 2010. For 2011, the contact believes Apple will sell as many as 45 million iPads
These numbers are not unreasonable. I expect about 35 million next year, though that could go up considerably depending on what we hear about last quarter. We only really have one data point so far meaning the data set is to double in a few days.
I don’t write product reviews and I don’t pass judgement on individual products but I do own and test various products. For example I have the Android powered Samsung Galaxy 5 (GT-I5500) and the experience is, in my opinion, better than for recent Symbian phones but not as smooth as for Apple’s products.
But that’s not what this article is about.
It’s about Continue reading “The strategic tension inherent in the iPhone franchise”
Thanks to a reader’s suggestion, I took another look at the profit and market share data from the mobile phone market overview posted last quarter. This time to compare the vendors on two dimensions at the same time.
I plotted the vendors on share of market and share of profit axes in two different points in time: Q2 2007 and Q2 2010. I further broke the chart into four quadrants as shown: Continue reading “The symmetry of share shifts in mobile phones”
I activated IntenseDebate comments. This allows many features (see below) including the editing of comments.
There might be some issues or bugs that will be discovered only once the system is in use so let me know what you observe.
The key features claimed are:
Readers will be able to follow the conversation within the comments better with comment threading. Comment threading makes reading comments manageable and returns the value of insightful comments to your site. Not only will your readers be more likely to comment, but they’ll be more likely to return to leave multiple comments as the debate gets going. Comment notification emails alert your readers when someone has responded to their comment and makes responding a piece of cake with our Reply By Email feature.
In addition, your readers will be able to vote on the comments made, and gain reputation points giving their comments more authority. Readers can subscribe to comments through our support of various RSS readers. Readers can follow their friends as they comment their way across the Internet. Not to mention that Intense Debate is a great tool for promoting their own blogs.
