Posts by Synthmeister 37 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Apr 2009
MS shouldn't give up on Mobile but instead remember their name--MicroSOFT! Forget trying to build hardware and start building the best mobile apps. The OEMS couldn't care less about MSs Mobile OS, that's why MS had to buy its own OEM, otherwise know as Nokia.
You forgot one thing though--Android tablets sales are flat as a pancake. Windows tablets surpassing Android tablets would be a complete non-event.
"Schmidt publicly admitted that Google was “late to tablets.” He also revealed that only 70,000 of the 1.3 million Android activations each day are for tablets." i.e only 5% of Android activations are tablets.
Remember the only successful "Android" tablets have forked Google out of their own ecosystem--Kindle and Nook, they don't count as Android activations.
It's utter failure of sales. Decent options or not, all none-iPad tablets have bombed.
Your most "successful" iPad tablets have:
1. Sold at fire sale prices so the companies can write off their loses--HP and RIM
2. Forked Google out of their own ecosystem while selling a cheap tablet at cost, selling a loss-leader service (Amazon Prime), selling razor-thin margin merchandise--Amazon and B&N.
3. Simply admitted the tablet market "sucks" --Android's poster child Samsung, which refuses to admit sales figures for tablets or cell-phones.
Let's see, we have:
1. Two tablet makers selling their wares at cost, hoping against hope they will be subsidized by future sales of merchandise--with razor-thin margins--and somehow raise those 1% profit margins. (Amazon/BN). (Meanwhile, Google is forked out their own ecosystem here--who knew "openness" could be so much fun?)
2. Two tablets makers going gangbusters in the market because they are selling their devices at fire-sale prices to keep their whole company or division from going up in flames. (RIM/HP)
3. The most 'successful' tablet OEM who admits that frankly, their tablet efforts, in a word, "suck." (Samsung)
Yep, that 30% of the non-Apple tablet market is gonna light it up this year!
RIM is absolutely taking a bath on the Playbook. RIM originally sold the PlayBook for $499, $599, or $699, depending on the onboard storage. Then they slashed all models to $299, then they slashed it again to $199, 249 and 299. By all accounts the build quality is much higher than the Kindle ($199 only 8GB) and most everyone says that Amazon is barely breaking even on the Kindle at best.
RIM can’t catch a break. Not only is the company coping with dismal PlayBook tablet sales, it’s also taking a near half-billion-dollar hit for sitting inventory that must now be sold at rock-bottom prices.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/12/rim-troubles-continue/
RIM announced on Friday that the company wouldn’t be meeting its financial targets for the year, primarily due to the unsuccessful performance of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. It pushed 150,000 units this quarter, compared with 250,000 last quarter, and 500,000 in the first quarter of the year.
The company is offering the troubled tablet for dramatically discounted prices through Dec. 3. Prices were slashed $300 across the product line-up, and quickly sold out at retailers like Best Buy by last week’s Black Friday. Nonetheless, RIM announced today that it’s recognizing “a pre-tax provision in the third quarter of fiscal 2012 of approximately $485 million, $360 million after tax, related to its inventory valuation of BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.”
1. Everyone in the world knows that the iPad 3 is coming out this week--of course iPad sales are slow. If the Playbook had outsold the iPad for a full quarter--instead of a week--that might be a little different.
2. PlayBook was supposed to sell for $499 not $199. RIM is taking a complete bath on this device. Selling more of these gizmos will help RIM go bankrupt sooner rather than later. They have Osborned themselves into a corner by publicizing their QNX future, yet having no phones to run it with yet. Their QNX tablet aspirations are a waste of time without a QNX phone.
I not arguing that iPad is better or not, RIM simply doesn't have a means of subsidizing the Playbook like this long term like Amazon can subsidize the Kindle.
Lowe's just equipped 42,000 employees with iPhones.
United Continental just gave out 11,000 iPads to their Pilots (Along with American Airlines and Alaska Air)
Qantas Airways Ltd.’s plans to offer Apple Inc.’s iPad media tablet to passengers on its Jetstar flights
Mercedes-Benz Financial, which provides loans and leases, will equip 40 dealerships with an iPad, will expand to all dealerships eventually.
86% of the Fortune 500 are now testing or deploying the iPad, up from 75% just three months ago. “In the 15 months since iPad was shipped, we’ve seen iPad used in the enterprise in ways we could have never imagined,” Oppenheimer said. “Companies like Boston Scientific, Xerox and Salesforce.com are deploying thousands of iPads in revolutionizing how their sales teams engage with customers. iPad is being used inside the country’s top hospitals like HCA and Cedars-Sinai and in retail at Nordstrom and Estee Lauder’s Clinique counters. General Electric, SAP and Standard Chartered have developed internal apps for training, currency tracking and business-process management to help make employees even more productive.
Security on the iPad is clearly not an issue.
Businesses are buying iDevices. Period.
18 months after the iPad 1 shipped, all MS can do is hand out a 2 pound personal heating tablet complete with fans, 3 hour battery life and schizophrenic pre-beta software? (I'm quoting PC-World Magazine here, not making this up.) Based on a Zune / WinMo 7 interface which bombed in the marketplace.
MS isn't in the mobile ring, they're still trying to get their GPS to work so they can find the mobile ring.
My Schadenfreude knows no bounds.
Do you guys even read the news before you write these articles?
Apple just used their cash hoard to buy up long term component contracts.
Price: $11 Billion
The joy of watching your clueless competitors flounder around looking for competitive component pricing?
Priceless.
That's why you keep $60 billion in the bank.
Apple's 10-Q form filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has revealed the largest sequential increase in purchase commitments for a March quarter to $11 billion, as iPad 2 production ramps up.
$11B in purchases planned as iPad 2 ramps up, iPhone 5 rumors heat up
The "10-Q Tidbits" were highlighted this week by analyst Katy Huberty with Morgan Stanley. The financial document shows that Apple's purchase commitments increased 39 percent quarter over quarter by the end of the March quarter.
Apple plans to spend $11 billion on components and other purchases in the March quarter, up from $7.9 billion at the end of 2010. That sequential increase is a record for a March quarter.
This article is full conjecture and speculation and zero basis in actual facts.
If you start flipping the subjects around, it makes much more sense, i.e. "Behind Samsung's/RIMs/WinMo's/HPalm's "success" are signs of desperation.
1. "For Apple, there has been disruption to its supply chain--no there hasn't, you apparently didn't read their quarterly report.
2. Apple itself is hovering precariously at the top of the curve--You're not hovering when you're the 2nd largest company in the world and your profit goes up 95% y/y for the quarter, you're blasting off, incinerating everything to dumb to stand close by. Again, did you actually read their report.
3. And as Google's own results indicated the company has only just begun in the mobile market,--Android's unit "activations" have soared--but Apple makes more money from mobile than all of Google put together.
4. Apple's quarter beat records as usual, but did not convince that the firm is more than a one-trick pony in mobile--Google is the one-trick pony here--selling your eyeballs to advertisers. Meanwhile Apple now has three distinct mobile product lines--iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad and the AppleTV is not far behind with 2 million sales since its introduction. GoogleTV and tablets are just a mess.
5. the iPad, though dominant in the nascent tablet category, is not yet proving that the category itself is a winner, or will be more than a niche form factor in the wave of new, cloud-focused products that will appear over the next few years--Except that it is beating the crap out everything and anything in its path and single-handidly made the category successful. iPad is selling now, everything else is completely missing an ecosystem, even the proposed "cloud' products.
6. The iPad sold 4.69m tablets, fewer than the 6.1m predicted by analysts or the 7.3m of the holiday quarter. It remains to be seen whether this is a short-term supply issue or an indicator of limited demand for the form factor.--so in other words, you don't know squat. You might have mentioned that the iPad 2 was introduced on March 2--freezing iPad 1 sales--and didn't go on sale till March 11 and the quarter ended March 26. Current quarter will show the strength of the iPad. Most analysts are predicting 40 to 50 million sales for 2011. It's everyone else that has nothing to show for the tablet initiatives. The mythical "cloud" solution won't fix that. The iPad can play in the clouds as well as any other tablet.
That's just the nonsense on the first half of the first page.
If you count iPads as PCs then Apple is the number three PC OEM in the world.
Market watcher Canalys said Wednesday that Apple's share of worldwide PC shipments, iPads and Macs included, increased 241% in the fourth quarter of 2010, giving Steve Jobs' company an overall share of 10.8%.
That puts Apple in a tie for third place with build-to-order giant Dell, and not far behind Taiwanese powerhouse Acer, whose share came in at 12.8%. HP led the pack with a share of 17.7%, according to Canalys.
But unfortunately, Windows has multiple disadvantages over the iPad in major areas which is why it is going to take MS two years to fix Windows so that it can compete in the tablet space. In the meantime, a lot of PC duties are going to be reassigned to Android and Apple tablets.
1. Windows is missing a thoroughly touch based interface--stylus and/or keyboard should be completely optional on a good tablet OS.
2. After fixing the OS for touch, MS must also make a version of their Office suite that is thoroughly touch based or create brand new apps that seamlessly integrate with the PC versions. That is no small feat.
3. Windows still lacks completely modern battery management routines for ultra low power consumption.
4. Windows lacks ARM support both in the OS and the mission critical apps. This is absolutely huge and even MS admits it will be at least two years before good things start to happen.
Windows and Intel wasted an entire decade not fixing the slate issues above, even though it was obvious that those problems were preventing their slates from selling. They just assumed that everyone would be locked into the Wintel/Office universe through eternity. Now, 100s of millions of Android/ARM/iDevice/non-MS-App users later, people realize that Wintel and Office aren't really that important to their happiness.
The only problem with your hope is that MS's Courier was a complete figment of MS's imagination with absolutely no bearing on what was feasible with MS software, MS's OS or the Intel chip architecture they are locked into. And of course, now they also have to have a 10 hour battery life and start at $500 to compete with the iPad.
MS and Intel completely dropped the ball and never addressed the central problems of their slate strategy over the past decade--weight, OS power-management, battery life, creating thoroughly slate-based OS/apps and of course, price. They just assumed users would never leave them for mobile devices not based or tied to Windows, Intel and/or Office.
Now MS and Intel will never catch up in the slate market. All the OEMs are enamored with either Android or their own home-brew OSes and don't give a flying rip.
The iPad--just like the iPhone--is exploding without a subsidy and the other OEMs can barely match the unsubsidized iPad price with smaller tablets AND a subsidy.
I'm sure Apple doesn't mind the extra Orange and T-mobile lunch money, but generally Apple is completely sidelining the telcos with the iPad and they don't even seem to realize it.
1. First iPad--Zero telco option, doesn't even have a 3G chip.
2. 3g iPad--no subscription required, pay as you go, stop when you want
3. China rollout--no telco meddling this time like with the kneecapped Chinese iPhone and no waiting for 3 years after the original device was introduced.
4. Verizon selling iPads in time for Christmas WITHOUT a CDMA chip and WITHOUT a two year subscription. This was a marketing masterstroke that must have put a huge lump of coal in Samsung's Christmas stocking.Even six months ago this idea would have been silly-talk and just goes to show how ambivalent Verizon is to Android and how desperate they are to get the iPhone
Also note that Apple made Facetime completely independent of the telcos. (And yes, I know that the current iPad can't do Facetime.)
The reason why other OEMs came out with "different" form factors than the iPad is because none of them could match the price of the 10" iPad unless they went with a 7" or 5" screen. Competitors may have learned some lessons from the iPhone, but so did Apple.
1. Avoid the telcos whenever possible. Note how the iPad is almost completely independent of the telcos. Note how the iPad is already on sale in China, no telcos involved.
2. Get your retail network in place as fast as possible. The iPad is already in every possible retail outlet--Walmart, Target, BB, Amazon, AT&T and even Verizon! People looking for a tablet this Christmas will only see iPad.
3. Ecosystem--iPhone was born into a very limited ecosystem compared to the iPad--Apps, e-books, iAds, podcasts, peripherals, music, movies, TV-shows, all ready to go. The newer slate OSes have squat.
4. Aggressive pricing--Apple has really gone for the pricing jugular on this one and will continue to do so because they can already count on selling 10s of millions of units. They other OEMs really can't make that bet. Note how there are virtually zero 10 inch tablets ready in time for Christmas that match Apple's quality and price.
5. Economies of scale: Apple alone will sell 80 million tablets in two years, forget 2015. They are already on track to sell close to 15 million tablets in 9 months and predictions are running around 40 to 50 million in 2011. Apple is sharing major components/OS/development/Apps between four major iDevices now--iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and the AppleTV. This gives them huge economies of scale that no one else has. And everyone else wants to use multiple form factors, OSes, app stores, etc. which will be their undoing
You are forgetting a couple things.
1. Apple encouraged everyone to write HTML5 apps for the iPhone when it was first introduced, and everyone screamed bloody murder. They all wanted to write native apps.
2. Apple is completely invested in HTML 5 and SproutCore. Apple is using them both to create their online MobileMe apps.
It's quite simple. Apple wants total control for apps in their store and open standards for apps on the web.
The scary thing for PC makers is that these figures DO NOT include iPad or iPod touch sales. (iPad and iPod touch both use the same chipset.)
The iPad is Apple's stealth nuclear option and the PC makers don't even realize it yet. The fact that the Mac keeps having one record quarter after another should have PC makers worried. The astonishing fact that the iPad will start outselling the Mac in less than a year should have them terrified. Add in the iPad/iPod touch sales to the Mac sales and suddenly Apple has locked up over 20% of the PC market. That is a huge seismic shift.
The iPad is what the Mac should have been
No one cares..
Posted Tuesday 13th July 2010 14:35 GMT
The biggest problem for MS, is that no one really cares about their mobile ambitions. Especially the OEMs that will have to sweat a little blood this time for MS to succeed. But just look at their former "partners:" Dell, Moto, HTC, LG, etc. have all shacked up with Ms. Android in the Google trailer park. After all, her favors are "free" and she is always "open." HP, Samsung and even BFF Intel have all found new mistresses. And of course, Apple and RIM have always been dedicated to OS monogamy. MS can simply get no love from anyone and even if they could, $8 to $15 per mobile license gets them no where, not when Apple is pulling in $600 per iPhone BEFORE apps, music, movies, TV shows, e-books, peripherals and now, iAds.
MS rode the unsuspecting coattails of IBM the first time around to achieve enormous profits and power. It's not going to happen the second time.
I believe the reason why Steve is so furious with Google is because there was a very close relationship with Google's founders and CEO Schmidt but after seeing the first iPhone, they clearly ripped off that concept for that device instead of ripping off the Blackberry concept. Instead of investing into the iPhone ecosystem, they wanted to compete. This is very similar to what happened with Bill Gates. Apple let him see the crown jewels of the Mac OS so that he could write software specifically for the Mac. But Gates saw how great the concept was and ripped off the whole interface idea of the Mac. Of course, there were a dozen other blunders (mostly self-inflicted) that Apple did in the 80s and 90s, but that blunder allowed MS to offer a "good enough" solution to the PC universe and avoid considering Macs.
That's why Apple controls almost all strategic parts of the Mac ecosystem (except for AT&T!) and could very, very quickly replace apps like Office or PS if they had to.
"One of the things I like about Google is that they don't use their users and developers as pawns."
Now that made me laugh. Google's whole business revolves around exploiting your web habits/data whether you like it or not. Just look at the whole streetview/wifi fiasco.
What these figures ignore is the huge iPhone OS userbase Apple is capturing with the iPod touch, which is now selling almost as well as the iPhone, practically doubling the iPhone marketshare for third parties interested in making money off the platform. At least in the US, many people can't or won't use AT&T or can't/won't pay an extra $35 per month for data and text messaging, so they just buy an iPod touch. Plus Apple is enticing millions of teens and pre-teens with the iPod touch. Where will they go when they can afford their own cell phone? To Apple, of course, so they won't lose all their favorite apps.
None of the other cell makers have anything to compete with the iPod touch, and they are ignoring it at great peril to their future.
1. No, Sony doesn't need a zillion developers, but if it wants to have the best chances going forwards, it's dev program needs to be seamless, cheap and easy.
2. Can't really comment on this since I haven't used it, so I'll ask, a question. Does the PSN store allow you to easily purchase apps, music, movies, TV shows, e-books, podcasts, etc. and easily sync them to multiple devices like iPods, iPhones, AppleTV, and allow other users on a wifi/ethernet network to share content? iTunes is seamless in this regard. I doubt Sony allows five devices to share apps like Apple does.
3. Their scheme may have worked in the past, but the past is gone. Apple completely changed the equation with the 70/30 split. Apple sells the cheap apps to sell high margin hardware, Sony has always sold loss leader hardware to sell high margin software. If developers decide they want the 70/30 split like Apple, that's a problem.
4. "the fact that you can simply pass on mp3's on a USB stick to your PS3, or set up media servers on your PC for your PSP & PS3" is not seamless for most consumers. This is one reason why the iPod succeeded and Sony's attempts to enter the digital media player market failed. Their software sucked. When Sony acquires 200 million credit card accounts with their sync software, then you can tell me it has become a seamless experience. BTW, you can dump mp3s into iTunes the same way, and you can drag them right back out of iTunes to use on any other device or software. There is no lock-in.
5. Yes the rootkit might have been the BMG, but Sony bought BMG and couldn't get their entertainment guys (BMG) to trust simple solutions by their tech guys. And the tech guys came up with proprietary crap like ATRAC, MiniDisk, memory sticks, UMD to solve the "problems" like allowing people to play mp3s. A visionary CEO would have cracked heads at the both divisions and made them come up with simple solutions to selling and playing content that was enjoyable for the consumer. Apple has it own proprietary way of doing stuff but at least they use mp3, AAC, h.264, webkit and HTML 5 whenever possible and Apple is largely responsible for pushing Sony and everyone else to drop DRM on music. That would have NEVER EVER happened if the iPod had not been a success and Sony/MS had succeeded with their portable music players.
The question is not if Sony could make some cool gizmo, the question is whether they can develop a supporting ecosystem as easy and seamless as Apple's. For example:
1. Will wanna-be developers for PSP and PS3 be able to download the SDKs from Sony for free, play with it and then only pay $100 per year to submit games and upgrades?
2. Can devs bypass brick and mortar stores/BR media/memory sticks and market their apps directly to the consumer online?
3. Will Sony give the developers a 70/30 split like Apple?
4. Will Sony develop an iTunes-like app to sync apps, music, movies, TV shows, etc. with Sony Phones and PSPs?
5. Which Mobile OS is Sony using now? Symbian? Android 1.6? How would that dovetail into the PSP? Are they gonna leave behind the old Sony symbian cell phones?
Remember in 2001 when Apple first introduced the iTMS, Jobs said it looked easy but it wasn't. Apple has had close to 6 years to refine the whole iTunes experience before the whole iPhone explosion and a year later the whole App store explosion. Meanwhile Sony was screwing around with ATRAC, MiniDisk, memory sticks, UMD and rootkits and their media guys prevented their tech guys from setting up an easy to use online store because they were so hyper about piracy.
If all this guy sees in the iPad is an overgrown iPhone, he is clearly misguided. If you don't know what I mean, just take a look at how Apple has completely revamped their iWork Apps, and the Calendar and Address books apps to exploit the very different form factor of the iPad. They are all very different from the Mac versions and the iPhone versions and completely customized for the iPad ergonomics. I won't be surprised if Asus comes up with a similarly hardware speced tablet that might even be cheaper than the iPad, and I'm sure it will have a lot more ports. But who is going to customize the OS and Apps from the ground up to use a completely touch-based interface, which ditches file folders, menus and such?
And yes, a couple months ago Acer was the one saying they could make an iPad tablet hardware-wise but realized they didn't have the ecosystem to support it. Maybe the guys at Asus need to do lunch with the guys at Acer.
If Nokia "know how to cut their manufacturing costs" as you say, then they aren't doing a very good job. In the last reported quarterly statements, Nokia sold 10 times as many cell phones as Apple but they lost several hundred million dollars for the quarter while Apple made billions. Apple is only trying to sell one model phone where they can make over $600 per phone before they even start counting app, music, movies, e-books and Apple-certified peripheral sales. Meanwhile, Nokia has wasted gobs of energy and money by offering over 200 cell phone models in the US alone. And which OS is Nokia pushing now? Is it Symbian or Maemo or MeeGoo?
One reason why Apple is so powerful in marketing is because they only need one message selling one product. iPhone! All they have to do in their commercials is show a real hand using a real iPhone using real apps. Nokia has real focus issues.
That was a long time ago in a galaxy far away.... But they still sell FileMaker Pro for Windows and Mac and it is a fantastic database program.
But pointing out that Aperture is not for Windows is just silly. None of Apple's pro level software has been available for Windows for years.
Apple didn't hype anything. They sent out a postcard and invited the press to an hour long presentation. The press and blogosphere did all the hyping, foaming at the mouth both for and against a product most of them have never seen, much less actually used.
Compare what Apple did to the Google Chrometablet mockups which suddenly, magically started floating around last week or total disaster known as the Crunchpad which completely missed all price/technology/open source goals or the complete vaporware otherwise known as Microsoft Courier, or the silly stealth bomber/alien technology ads Moto ran for the Droid. That's what I call hype.
Apple shows a real human hand working real apps on a real iPhone. You can't get more real than that.
Whether you think the touch screen is suited for games doesn't matter because games are clearly a BIG deal on the touch and the iPhone. Otherwise there wouldn't be 20K games in the app store and companies like iD, EA, Capcom and LucasArts wouldn't be investing in developing iPod games. Saying that a touch screen is completely unsuited to gaming is just ridiculous. Some games will work better, some won't and some will have to be creatively rewritten. Just look at Pangea's games. Virtually every game they have on the iPhone was written for the Mac before the iPhone was even a concept. They were enjoying a "modest' success. (They being mostly one guy.) The iPhone came out, he ported all his games and now he is rolling in money. Just check out Pangea's website if you want to see some fascinating insight into games on the iPhone/iPod touch.
In two years Apple has 50 million people in its user base and they haven't even started selling in China and they haven't even started branching out into different product lines like a tablet or enabling games on AppleTV. My 12 year old son just bought his first iPod touch after saving money for a year. Guess what? None of his friends want a Nintendo DS for Christmas anymore.
Sony and Nintendo should be afraid. Very afraid.
The HD part of the ZuneHD will not work in Europe. But otherwise it's a phenomenal feature. Oh, yea, and the cutting edge OLED washes out in any kind of bright light and actually uses more power than an LCD screen but it's good to watch in a dark room. And apparently MS shipped some Zunes without software but you can download it from the internet real soon.
I agree with you completely. Unless Verizon were to offer Apple some amazing concessions, there is really no reason whatsoever for Apple to waste time producing a CDMA phone that will be yesterday's technology in less than two years and not really marketable anywhere else in the world. Apple can easily wait until AT&T and Verizon both use the same tech. AT&T sales will continue to grow in the meantime and the addition of China, new iPhone models, accelerating sales of iPod touches and OS 3.0 will continue to grow the Apple iPhone universe.
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