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Author: Horace Dediu

Asymcar 9. Stasis: Depreciation, Brands, Information Intransigence

Horace and Jim discuss shopping online for used cars and how and why the value of cars disappears so quickly. The conversation drifts into information asymmetry, the declining interest in auto maintenance and the perpetual closed-loop auto information model. We hypothesize on the impact of the coming self-monitoring and awareness of the lives of vehicles. Finally we ask whether the dysfunction in the industry is the cause or the effect of the ancient integrated factory model and the sustaining auto eco-system incentives that impede transformation.

Asymcar 9. Stasis: Depreciation, Brands, Information Intransigence | Asymcar.

Of bits and big bucks

Exactly one year ago, on January 7th, 2013, Apple announced that the App Store reached 40 billion downloads1. Here are additional data points from that release:

  • 20 billion downloads in 2012
  • 2 billion downloads in December 2012
  • 500 million active iTunes accounts
  • 775,000 apps
  • sold in 155 countries
  • 300,000 native iPad apps
  • over $7 billion in developer payments

This year, on January 7th, 2014, Apple announced a new set of data points:

  • $10 billion spent on the App Store in 2013
  • $1 billion in December 2013
  • 3 billion app downloads in December 2013
  • 1,000,000 apps
  • sold in 155 countries
  • 500,000 native iPad apps
  • $15 billion in developer payments

The obvious:

  1. 225,000 apps were added in 2013
  2. 200,000 native iPad apps added in 2013
  3. App download rate for December increased by 50%
  4. No new countries were added in 2013
  5. $8 billion was paid to developers in 2013 (more than in all previous years put together)

The less obvious: Continue reading “Of bits and big bucks”

  1. Unique downloads excluding re-downloads and updated [↩]

When will smartphones saturate?

GSMA Intelligence reports provide valuable statistics on the growth of mobile networks. One in particular shows the history of regional smartphone penetration.

I took the historic data and plotted it as follows:

Screen Shot 2014-01-07 at 1-7-1.43.56 PM

Note that I chose to model using the same logistic function that I have used to describe the US market (as measured by comScore) and the global Internet user market (as measured by the ITU) and the stove, landline phone, Electricity, automobile, consumer radios, washing machines, refrigerators, TVs, dryers, air conditioning, dishwashers, microwaves, VCRs, PCs, cellphones.

It’s also the same model used to show the rise and fall of energy sources, canals, railroads, roads and air travel.

If we believe that smartphones in parts other than US and Europe will behave the same way as all the other technologies listed above then the forecast penetration is likely to follow the thin lines in the graphs above.1

With the exception of Africa and Middle East, note that the primary difference between regions is not the rate of growth in penetration but rather the delay in adoption. I marked this delay as 4 years between US/EU and Central & Eastern Europe. An additional one year delay to Asia Pacific region and 4 years more to Africa/Middle East adoption.

The resulting smartphone user forecast is shown below.

Screen Shot 2014-01-07 at 1-7-1.36.39 PM

Although 2013 was often cited as the year when smartphones saturated (“everybody that wants one has one”), the total population of users will likely take another decade to reach maximum. The point of inflection in global growth could be expected in 2017.

What most observers sensed was the point of inflection in growth in North America and Western Europe. Those regions are 11% of the world’s population.

  1. This is a big if, and, judging by their forecast, one which the GSMA Intelligence team seems not to believe will happen. [↩]

On the future of the Internet and everything

According to ITU data, Internet usage reached about 2.2% penetration in the US (2.2 users per 100 residents) in 1993. The figure in 2012 was 81%. The history of penetration is shown in the following graphs.

Screen Shot 2014-01-03 at 1-3-12.17.41 PM

Similar graphs can be drawn for other countries (data is available for 193 countries/territories.) I chose the following set of countries arbitrarily: Continue reading “On the future of the Internet and everything”

ניהול אחר אפל: צבא התפוחים הסודי: An article on Apple in Calcalist

ניהול אחר אפל: צבא התפוחים הסודי.

An article by Dor Zach, correspondent at Calcalist, the largest economic newspaper in Israel.

I offered some thoughts on Apple’s current strategy, and the various misconceptions about the company.

(Hebrew only so if anyone wishes to summarize it in comments, it would be helpful to others).

The China Mobile iPhone MOQ

“BEIJING and CUPERTINO, California—December 22, 2013—Apple® and China Mobile today announced they have entered into a multi-year agreement to bring iPhone® to the world’s largest mobile network. As part of the agreement, iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c will be available from China Mobile’s expansive network of retail stores as well as Apple retail stores across mainland China beginning on Friday, January 17, 2014.

China Mobile & Apple Bring iPhone to China Mobile’s 4G & 3G Networks on January 17, 2014 – Yahoo Finance

January 17 seems to be an auspicious date.1

Precisely a year prior to that date, on January 17, 2013, I wrote The iPhone MOQ.

Within that post I showed the activation rates for US operators as a percent of total users. Figures ranged from 10% to 19% by year or operators. I further assumed the figures would be toward the high end of that in Japan based on statements by the president of NTT DoCoMo.

The last phrase I used was:

“The MOQ figure as percent of subs for China Mobile would also be an interesting point of debate.”

My assumption would be that CM would start at a base significantly lower than the US or Japan. I would not be surprised to see an MOQ of 4% of user base for 2014. In the press release above China Mobile states that they serve 760 million customers. That implies a minimum order of about 30 million iPhones.

In the absence of any other data it’s best to be conservative.

  1. January 17 is a lucky day in Chinese numerology: 1+7=8 is a multiple of number 8, which is the most auspicious number.  Joe Zou @zzbar via Twitter [↩]

Airshow 2014 World Tour: Coming to a City Near You

Screen Shot 2013-12-19 at 12-19-3.48.45 PM

In a world where everyone needs to present, few know the power that lies under their fingertips.

Whether one-on-one or in front of millions on TV, presentations are the primary means of persuasion in business.

Have you ever cringed at text-only slides or puzzled over graphs that made no sense? Steve Jobs saw “PowerPoints” as “rambling and nonsensical” and had them banned internally. But he used visuals for all his keynotes. What made them tolerable, even persuasive?

The problem is that most people receive no training in how to compose the most crucial images they project to an audience and the tools available do not take advantage of motion, touch, processing power, mobility and high resolutions.

  • Airshow teaches principles of visual persuasion using techniques of cinematography and visual storytelling.
  • Airshow shows how tablets create a new stage for your performance.
  • Airshow applies Aristotelian rhetoric, Cinematographic theory and Cinematic storytelling as well as Tufte design principles into a new medium.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Persuade with logic, empathy and credibility.
  • Present rich data as compelling and emotionally engaging
  • Get hands-on experience with modern tools of persuasion including tablets and interactive, touch-based interfaces.

You have the data. You have the audience. All you need is a story and a screenplay. How do you build them?

There are techniques which are proven to work. They’ve been used by writers, performers and playwrights for centuries. Professional presentation coaches will teach you far less and at greater expense.

  • Airshow is better and less expensive, especially in terms of time.
  • Airshow is an intimate experience. Audience size is limited.
  • All the tools and techniques needed in one day of intense, inspirational and engaging training.

Airshow could be coming to a town near you but to make it happen you need to act now.

Here’s how it works: For every month in 2014 an Airshow event will be hosted. The location for that month will be locked-in when the first 20 registrations for that city will be recorded. Any registrations that take place before the location is locked-in will be half-price.

In other words, early registration means you get half off!1

Now is the time to learn presentation skills for the post-PC era. Just like there is no writing which does a movie justice, I can’t write here how it’s done, you have to see it live.

Register now.

HERE’S WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT AIRSHOW

“Airshow was amazing. Business stories with cinematic impact made easy with perspective”
— Paul Brody, Global Business Leader, IBM

“Airshow has fundamentally changed how I give client and industry presentations. It is an important tool in my toolbox which allows me to showcase my data and my story in ways that help audiences gain deeper insight and perspective.”
— Ben Bajarin, TIME, TabTimes, Techpinions

“Nobody brings numbers to life like Horace Dediu does.”
—Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune/CNN

“The unhurried nature of Airshow is just terrific and in contrast to many other events. Anyone who goes will gain their own purposes.”
—Steve Crandall

“Airshow is a treat […] showing how to make the audience wonder.”
—Bertram Gugel

“Airshow is surpassing my expectations. Very interesting deep content.”
—Ryan Singer, 37signals.

  1. If your registration is not part of a quorum (fewer than 20 total) then it’s automatically re-issued for the following month. You may also request a refund. [↩]

Moonshot

When describing the process of disruptive innovation, Clay Christensen set about to also describe the process by which a technology is developed by visionaries in a commercially unsuccessful way. He called it cramming.

Cramming is a process of trying to make a not-yet-good-enough technology great without allowing it to be bad. In other words, it’s taking an ambitious goal and aiming at it with vast resources of time and money without allowing the mundane trial and error experimentation in business models.

To illustrate cramming I borrowed his story of how the transistor was embraced by incumbents in the US vs. entrants in Japan and how that led to the downfall of the US consumer electronics industry.

Small upstarts were able to take the invention, wrap a new business model around it that motivated the current players to ignore or flee their entry. They thus successfully displaced the entrenched incumbents even though the incumbents were investing heavily in the technology and the entrants weren’t.

In the image below, the blue “path taken by established vacuum tube manufacturers” is the cramming approach vs. the green entry by outsiders who worked on minor new products which could make use of the rough state of transistors at their early stages of development.

Screen Shot 2013-12-17 at 12-17-3.04.59 PM

The history of investment in transistor-based electronics shows how following the money (i.e. R&D) did not lead to value creation, quite the opposite. There are many such examples: The billions spent on R&D by Microsoft did not help them build a mobile future and the billions spent on R&D by Nokia did not help them build a computing future.

There are other white elephant stories such as IBM’s investment in speech recognition to replace word processing, the Japanese government spending on “Fifth Generation Computing” and almost all research into machine translation and learning from the 1960s to the present.

But today we hear about initiatives such as package delivery drones and driverless cars and robots and Hyperloops and are hopeful. Perhaps under the guiding vision of the wisest, most benevolent business wizards, breakthrough technologies and new infrastructures can finally be realized and we can gain the growth and wealth that we deserve but are so sorely lacking.

Continue reading “Moonshot”

Bundling and Pricing Innovation

This was initially posted on LinkedIn December 16, 2013.

Innovation comes in many forms. Many times innovation is thought of as technological improvement or as invention. We can all cite examples of inventions which turned into industries which re-defined civilization. The steam engine comes to mind but there were many others before and after. Inventing something is certainly a way to create value but it’s not as common or as reliable a method as it might seem. Creating Intellectual Property is one thing, finding a defensible market and business model is quite another.

More often companies innovate in terms of processes or the “algorithms” which are used to deploy existing resources. Wal*Mart was immensely innovative in the way it organized itself and laid out a low-cost business model. More recently Amazon has innovated in distribution and fulfillment based on the ability to dispense with showrooms for products and sell directly online. There is little in terms of technology which Amazon “invented”. Rather, it deployed off-the-shelf technology in a novel way.

But what I want to address is a more mundane sort of innovation: marketing innovation, specifically pricing. Few would consider a price model to be an innovation but in fact it’s a core lynchpin to many breakthrough innovations. It was pricing which permitted Henry Ford to build an industrial empire. He could have built cars for those who could afford them as cars were defined in 1907 but he chose to build a car around a price point which was around the median of the population. A car “so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.” His business logic began with a price and the product and process followed.

Continue reading “Bundling and Pricing Innovation”