5 ms·
The iPhone exploited a rift in the space-time fabric. The right features at the right time, everybody had to have one and the margins are totally insane. That
by wstrange 10y ago
The iPhone exploited a rift in the space-time fabric.
The right features at the right time, everybody had to have one and the margins are totally insane.
That can't last. The market is nearing saturation, and competitive pressures will erode margins.
It seems unlikely they will have another product that generates as much cash as the iPhone.
They will still be a very profitable company, but perhaps not the cash printing machine that we have seen over the last 5 years.
- coldtea 10y agoThe exact same thing holds for Google Search. They have not generated any product that brings as much cash as search ads (not even close) -- and that's since 1998 or so. Google Docs, Google +, Google Glass (lol) etc never went anywhere much, revenue wise, and even Android is mostly a loss as far as Google is concerned, even including licenses and mobile ads (makes a good buck for Samsung though). > The market is nearing saturation, and competitive pressures will erode margins. They serve the top end of the market (neither feature phones, not "just give me some smartphone free with the contract") where there are not much competitive pressures and they've been milking more profit than all Android shops combined at that. Besides, that we have been kept hearing since 2008 when Android appeared, and it hasn't even happened in the desktop/laptop space (the sell 5-10% of PCs and get 45% of the PC profits).
- dzhiurgis 10y agoGoogle has not made anything that generates the profit, but they still can pull some levers to make their search even more difficult (remove verbatim for example) so you'd spend more time on it (thus generate more ad money). Also they've got those cute/silly moonshots that just might pan out.