6 ms·

Ceding the Crown

48 points by siglesias 14y ago

bad_user 14y ago
I wish people would stop posting garbage from John Gruber.
- johnny22 14y ago
  not exactly garbage. He seems to have a correct analysis as to how the business press works. I still don't think this particular article is all that much use for HN though.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  It's certainly biased, the question is whether or not it's a well-founded argument that leads to a worthwhile discussion. I think it fits that bill.
  - bad_user 14y ago
    I've never seen an interesting discussion on any piece by Gruber, since most articles are flamebait-ish populist articles that bring out the fanboyism in people, with discussions degenerating into dick measuring contests of who's favourite is better. Nothing good can come out of it.
- evan_ 14y ago
  What's he wrong about?
mrich 14y ago
This reads like a populist piece, trying to convince people with arguments that sound logical but are just wrong. Of course Apple had the market share lead with the iPhone. But the category was not "smartphone". They had a dominating lead in the category "mobile phone with touch UI and great web browser" from 2007-2010. Nobody cared about Symbian anymore after the presentation of the iPhone. That category was left to die. The iPhone became the new state of the art for smartphone. Apple lost the lead around 2011 however due to the unwillingness to provide more than one model or innovate faster. Android was more flexible and could address more users. Now it may well be that Apple doesn't care about this at all. But please do not make arguments how technically Apple never led in the smartphone market.
- justin66 14y ago
  > This reads like a populist piece, trying to convince people with arguments that sound logical but are just wrong. I see you've discovered the writing of John Gruber.
- guywithabike 14y ago
  "Of course Apple had the market share lead with the iPhone. But the category was not "smartphone". ... The iPhone became the new state of the art for smartphone." You're contradicting yourself, there. Were pre-iPhone smartphones not smartphones? Were Windows Mobile 6 phones not smartphones? Where's your line? And anyways, Gruber's not talking about your personal definition of smartphone, he's talking about the commonly accepted category of smartphones. Besides, what in Gruber's piece is factually inaccurate? You said his arguments "sound logical but are just wrong" but don't actually point out any inaccuracies.
  - kybernetikos 14y ago
    I don't think he's contradicting himself, he's not saying that there wasn't a smartphone category before iphone, he's saying exactly that people didn't buy iphone because it was a great 'smartphone' (it had fewer features - the way people would have evaluated smartphones before iphone - on launch than smartphones that had been around for years), they bought iphone because it was a great touchscreen phone and browser experience. I think he's roughly right about that. They created a new experience and that experience became necessary to sell advanced phones. The article talks about how apple pioneered the 'more computer than phone' over the 'more phone than computer'. That's nonsense revisionist history, there were plenty of 'more computer than phones' out there years before and the iphone was significantly behind some of them in terms of computer-like behaviour. What Apple did was create a swipe friendly experience that became mandatory. What 'smartphone' meant changed dramatically, to the extent that people don't classify phones that can run apps, browse the web, play mp3s, ssh into servers, etc as smart phones these days unless they have a swipe friendly UI. To be honest though, I find the whole article pointless. I don't care about whether the media is using the wrong metric to call winners and losers in the 'smartphone' market. I'm not really interested in the media's view on this matter. I am interested in which phone is right for me, and it's not an iphone.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
polemic 14y ago
I don't know if the article has been edited since Gruber first read it, but there appear to be sufficient statistics to back up Gupta's assertions: > "Samsung had 30.3 percent of the smartphone market in 2012, up from 19 percent a year earlier. Apple's share was 19.1 percent last year, up from 18.8 percent in 2011." Gupta's general tone is eminently reasonable: > "That onslaught, coupled with growing uncertainty about whether the U.S. giant can sustain growth in coming years, has contributed to a 30 percent decline in Apple's stock since its September peak." I don't see a “Oh, how the mighty Apple has fallen” narrative - Gupta is commenting on the market's bet against Apple. If the market is really knocked off 30% of their value based on media scaremongering, you've got (a) a huge market failure, and (b) a sure bet in Apple. Gruber's only contribution to the discussion appears to be hand-wringing about the way poor old Apple is being treated.
- simonh 14y ago
  > Gupta is commenting on the market's bet against Apple. If the market has bet against Apple, how come Apple's market cap today is double that of Samsung? In what universe is pricing a company as being twice as valuable betting against it?
- jonhendry 14y ago
  "but there appear to be sufficient statistics to back up Gupta's assertions:" One of Gruber's points is that Apple never had the most market share in smartphones. So they haven't lost anything in that respect. But Apple had, and still have, most of the profits from the smartphone market, with Samsung coming in a distant 2nd, even now, at about half of Apple's iPhone profits. And the other vendors are losing money.
  - polemic 14y ago
    Sure, but it's also largely irrelevant. Movement of stock price is the metric that Gupta's audience is interested in. Apple's current profit margin is already priced in - a reduction in profit (via an increase in margin, loss of market share, etc) is as good as a loss, from the investors perspective.
- 14y ago
nasmorn 14y ago
Going by the headline I was hoping he would finally anounce that he is officially ceding markdown leadership thus making the life of the people actually working on it better.
realize 14y ago
His main point (and the title of his article) is that people are stating as fact that apple has fallen, whereas their profits are still stronger than anyone's. This is true, and he must feel like hes in a world of crazy people that its even necessary to point this out.
- coldtea 14y ago
  Well, the world IS full of crazy people. The see the Android market share and thing Apple is doomed. For some reason they forget that Apple never went for market share, and only addresses the more profitable (margin wise) segments of the market. They also forget the bloody apparent fact that the same thing happens in the PC market. Is Dell or HP "winning" because they sell more units?
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  The tech world IS CRAZY! Imagine you're a VP over at Microsoft right now watching everyone rave about Samsung's profit figures and their utter dominance and you just want to scream "hello?! we also made $21 billion in profit last year, except we did it on 1/3 of Samsung's revenue! does anyone care?!" No, no one cares. Microsoft has already been relegated to the dust bin of history even though it's still alive and kicking, still one of the most profitable companies in all of human civilization, etc. Sure, they've ceded much of the initiative in tech to other movers, but they're very much far from dead and far from irrelevant. Stepping into the world of tech punditry is a bit like stepping into a Target department store, except instead of seeing advertising and merchandise for holidays 2 seasons away you see companies declared winners, losers, or dead years ahead of their time. What really annoys me is that people are talking about dumb stuff, horse race stuff. It's like sitting at the lunch table and overhearing how Johnny dumped Erika and is now dating Michelle or some such other riveting high-school gossip. What's that quote? Small minds discuss people (companies). Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas. Can we talk more about the ideas relevant to this massive second revolution in personal computing going on under our noses and less about which multi-billion dollar mega-corp is the most popular kid in school at the moment?
  - simonh 14y ago
rglullis 14y ago
We've never been at war with Eastasia...
nhashem 14y ago
It's unfortunate that Gruber has essentially become synonymous with Apple fanboyism, because I think he raises some salient points here. To any reader that is familiar with his writing, it'll come across as the typical Apple cheerleading, suggesting that weaknesses are actually strengths, and any competition isn't really competition because Apple is really just engaged in a long-term, visionary, eleventy-dimensional chess match in its noble and exalted goal of driving the human race forward. But I agree with him on the first two misconceptions he tries to correct. The iPhone was never a market share game. In 2004, the original Motorola RAZR was like $400 at launch, and three months later it came free in cereal boxes. That's what you do when you are trying to gain market share. Apple's products are effectively a luxury brand for consumer electronics, and criticizing Apple for not winning the market share game is like criticizing Lulumelon for selling fewer yoga pants than Target. Also, the iPhone and iPhone 3G were objectively great products. It would have been great even if RIM wasn't releasing awful products by comparison. Their other product lines have continued to be popular even as other companies have learned how to make products that are just as thin or have screens just as sharp. So I agree with him on that point, that there's not much merit to the argument, "well the iPhone only sold well because everyone else sucks, and now the Galaxy is just as good so they're screwed." But, his third point is where I diverge with him on his conclusions. "Apple is a great competitor. In the PC industry they’ve fought back from the brink of bankruptcy to become the most profitable and fastest-growing PC maker in the world. They came in and stole the music player market, and have dominated it for over a decade." Well, look. To suggest that this is a fait accompli, without even mentioning the fact that Steve Jobs is no longer with the company so maybe they're going to struggle in learning how to 'fight back' without him, is extremely misguided to me. I never knew Steve Jobs personally, but I'd like to think that if he visited Apple now, he'd say something like, "I've been dead for two years and we're still talking about which company is better at making flat touch screen computers? That's boring now. Let's invent something new. And by the way, fire whomever thought it was okay to have 21 icons on the iPhone 5." Like I said, I don't know Steve Jobs, and I don't work at Apple. But it would seem like if you're going to suggest Apple's still on the ball and market share is irrelevant because they're focused on 'advancing the human race,' you'd probably want to explain how they're going to do it without the one guy that coined the motto to begin with.
- 14y ago
shadowmint 14y ago
I think he's missing the point. This isn't a commercial fail for Apple, its a public relations fail. Two years ago, I knew maybe 2 people who didn't want an iphone. I now, personally, know perhaps 4 people who want one. You think that isn't a fall from grace in the public opinion? It is. It's a colossal blunder for Apple, and "once stood the undisputed leader of the smartphone arena, but ceded its crown to Samsung in 2012." seems a fair (harsh, yes, but under the circumstances, I think pretty fair) comment. I'm not arguing with the points in the article; they seem quite reasonable (unusually so, for Gruber), but there's more to this story than 'how commercially successful is Apple'.
- alex_doom 14y ago
  Your reasoning that Apple has fallen from grace is a personal observation that most people you know don't want one?
sgdesign 14y ago
I won't read this, because I feel like I've been reading the same exact article every day for the past year. It's not a question of fanboyism. I completely agree with everything he's saying. I just don't understand why he needs to address that Android vs Apple day after day. Am I missing something here? Does what blog X says about Apple or what magazine Y says about Samsung have any impact on the world whatsoever? John Gruber seems like a smart guy and I'm continuously baffled by his decision to devote so much time and effort to such a trivial matter.
- erichocean 14y ago
  Am I missing something here? He does it for page views. News at 11.
  - Ygg2 14y ago
    He promotes a brand he loves and gets paid for it. But yeah, Gruber is either an Apple fanboy and/or someone profiting on other people's devotion to Apple brand.

Ceding the Crown

48 points by siglesias 14y ago

bad_user 14y ago

I wish people would stop posting garbage from John Gruber.

johnny22 14y ago
not exactly garbage. He seems to have a correct analysis as to how the business press works. I still don't think this particular article is all that much use for HN though.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
It's certainly biased, the question is whether or not it's a well-founded argument that leads to a worthwhile discussion. I think it fits that bill.
- bad_user 14y ago
  I've never seen an interesting discussion on any piece by Gruber, since most articles are flamebait-ish populist articles that bring out the fanboyism in people, with discussions degenerating into dick measuring contests of who's favourite is better. Nothing good can come out of it.
evan_ 14y ago
What's he wrong about?

mrich 14y ago

This reads like a populist piece, trying to convince people with arguments that sound logical but are just wrong. Of course Apple had the market share lead with the iPhone. But the category was not "smartphone". They had a dominating lead in the category "mobile phone with touch UI and great web browser" from 2007-2010. Nobody cared about Symbian anymore after the presentation of the iPhone. That category was left to die. The iPhone became the new state of the art for smartphone. Apple lost the lead around 2011 however due to the unwillingness to provide more than one model or innovate faster. Android was more flexible and could address more users. Now it may well be that Apple doesn't care about this at all. But please do not make arguments how technically Apple never led in the smartphone market.

justin66 14y ago
> This reads like a populist piece, trying to convince people with arguments that sound logical but are just wrong. I see you've discovered the writing of John Gruber.
guywithabike 14y ago
"Of course Apple had the market share lead with the iPhone. But the category was not "smartphone". ... The iPhone became the new state of the art for smartphone." You're contradicting yourself, there. Were pre-iPhone smartphones not smartphones? Were Windows Mobile 6 phones not smartphones? Where's your line? And anyways, Gruber's not talking about your personal definition of smartphone, he's talking about the commonly accepted category of smartphones. Besides, what in Gruber's piece is factually inaccurate? You said his arguments "sound logical but are just wrong" but don't actually point out any inaccuracies.
- kybernetikos 14y ago
  I don't think he's contradicting himself, he's not saying that there wasn't a smartphone category before iphone, he's saying exactly that people didn't buy iphone because it was a great 'smartphone' (it had fewer features - the way people would have evaluated smartphones before iphone - on launch than smartphones that had been around for years), they bought iphone because it was a great touchscreen phone and browser experience. I think he's roughly right about that. They created a new experience and that experience became necessary to sell advanced phones. The article talks about how apple pioneered the 'more computer than phone' over the 'more phone than computer'. That's nonsense revisionist history, there were plenty of 'more computer than phones' out there years before and the iphone was significantly behind some of them in terms of computer-like behaviour. What Apple did was create a swipe friendly experience that became mandatory. What 'smartphone' meant changed dramatically, to the extent that people don't classify phones that can run apps, browse the web, play mp3s, ssh into servers, etc as smart phones these days unless they have a swipe friendly UI. To be honest though, I find the whole article pointless. I don't care about whether the media is using the wrong metric to call winners and losers in the 'smartphone' market. I'm not really interested in the media's view on this matter. I am interested in which phone is right for me, and it's not an iphone.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

polemic 14y ago

I don't know if the article has been edited since Gruber first read it, but there appear to be sufficient statistics to back up Gupta's assertions: > "Samsung had 30.3 percent of the smartphone market in 2012, up from 19 percent a year earlier. Apple's share was 19.1 percent last year, up from 18.8 percent in 2011." Gupta's general tone is eminently reasonable: > "That onslaught, coupled with growing uncertainty about whether the U.S. giant can sustain growth in coming years, has contributed to a 30 percent decline in Apple's stock since its September peak." I don't see a “Oh, how the mighty Apple has fallen” narrative - Gupta is commenting on the market's bet against Apple. If the market is really knocked off 30% of their value based on media scaremongering, you've got (a) a huge market failure, and (b) a sure bet in Apple. Gruber's only contribution to the discussion appears to be hand-wringing about the way poor old Apple is being treated.

simonh 14y ago
> Gupta is commenting on the market's bet against Apple. If the market has bet against Apple, how come Apple's market cap today is double that of Samsung? In what universe is pricing a company as being twice as valuable betting against it?
jonhendry 14y ago
"but there appear to be sufficient statistics to back up Gupta's assertions:" One of Gruber's points is that Apple never had the most market share in smartphones. So they haven't lost anything in that respect. But Apple had, and still have, most of the profits from the smartphone market, with Samsung coming in a distant 2nd, even now, at about half of Apple's iPhone profits. And the other vendors are losing money.
- polemic 14y ago
  Sure, but it's also largely irrelevant. Movement of stock price is the metric that Gupta's audience is interested in. Apple's current profit margin is already priced in - a reduction in profit (via an increase in margin, loss of market share, etc) is as good as a loss, from the investors perspective.
14y ago

nasmorn 14y ago

Going by the headline I was hoping he would finally anounce that he is officially ceding markdown leadership thus making the life of the people actually working on it better.

realize 14y ago

His main point (and the title of his article) is that people are stating as fact that apple has fallen, whereas their profits are still stronger than anyone's. This is true, and he must feel like hes in a world of crazy people that its even necessary to point this out.

coldtea 14y ago
Well, the world IS full of crazy people. The see the Android market share and thing Apple is doomed. For some reason they forget that Apple never went for market share, and only addresses the more profitable (margin wise) segments of the market. They also forget the bloody apparent fact that the same thing happens in the PC market. Is Dell or HP "winning" because they sell more units?
InclinedPlane 14y ago
The tech world IS CRAZY! Imagine you're a VP over at Microsoft right now watching everyone rave about Samsung's profit figures and their utter dominance and you just want to scream "hello?! we also made $21 billion in profit last year, except we did it on 1/3 of Samsung's revenue! does anyone care?!" No, no one cares. Microsoft has already been relegated to the dust bin of history even though it's still alive and kicking, still one of the most profitable companies in all of human civilization, etc. Sure, they've ceded much of the initiative in tech to other movers, but they're very much far from dead and far from irrelevant. Stepping into the world of tech punditry is a bit like stepping into a Target department store, except instead of seeing advertising and merchandise for holidays 2 seasons away you see companies declared winners, losers, or dead years ahead of their time. What really annoys me is that people are talking about dumb stuff, horse race stuff. It's like sitting at the lunch table and overhearing how Johnny dumped Erika and is now dating Michelle or some such other riveting high-school gossip. What's that quote? Small minds discuss people (companies). Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas. Can we talk more about the ideas relevant to this massive second revolution in personal computing going on under our noses and less about which multi-billion dollar mega-corp is the most popular kid in school at the moment?
- simonh 14y ago

rglullis 14y ago

We've never been at war with Eastasia...

nhashem 14y ago

It's unfortunate that Gruber has essentially become synonymous with Apple fanboyism, because I think he raises some salient points here. To any reader that is familiar with his writing, it'll come across as the typical Apple cheerleading, suggesting that weaknesses are actually strengths, and any competition isn't really competition because Apple is really just engaged in a long-term, visionary, eleventy-dimensional chess match in its noble and exalted goal of driving the human race forward. But I agree with him on the first two misconceptions he tries to correct. The iPhone was never a market share game. In 2004, the original Motorola RAZR was like $400 at launch, and three months later it came free in cereal boxes. That's what you do when you are trying to gain market share. Apple's products are effectively a luxury brand for consumer electronics, and criticizing Apple for not winning the market share game is like criticizing Lulumelon for selling fewer yoga pants than Target. Also, the iPhone and iPhone 3G were objectively great products. It would have been great even if RIM wasn't releasing awful products by comparison. Their other product lines have continued to be popular even as other companies have learned how to make products that are just as thin or have screens just as sharp. So I agree with him on that point, that there's not much merit to the argument, "well the iPhone only sold well because everyone else sucks, and now the Galaxy is just as good so they're screwed." But, his third point is where I diverge with him on his conclusions. "Apple is a great competitor. In the PC industry they’ve fought back from the brink of bankruptcy to become the most profitable and fastest-growing PC maker in the world. They came in and stole the music player market, and have dominated it for over a decade." Well, look. To suggest that this is a fait accompli, without even mentioning the fact that Steve Jobs is no longer with the company so maybe they're going to struggle in learning how to 'fight back' without him, is extremely misguided to me. I never knew Steve Jobs personally, but I'd like to think that if he visited Apple now, he'd say something like, "I've been dead for two years and we're still talking about which company is better at making flat touch screen computers? That's boring now. Let's invent something new. And by the way, fire whomever thought it was okay to have 21 icons on the iPhone 5." Like I said, I don't know Steve Jobs, and I don't work at Apple. But it would seem like if you're going to suggest Apple's still on the ball and market share is irrelevant because they're focused on 'advancing the human race,' you'd probably want to explain how they're going to do it without the one guy that coined the motto to begin with.

14y ago

shadowmint 14y ago

I think he's missing the point. This isn't a commercial fail for Apple, its a public relations fail. Two years ago, I knew maybe 2 people who didn't want an iphone. I now, personally, know perhaps 4 people who want one. You think that isn't a fall from grace in the public opinion? It is. It's a colossal blunder for Apple, and "once stood the undisputed leader of the smartphone arena, but ceded its crown to Samsung in 2012." seems a fair (harsh, yes, but under the circumstances, I think pretty fair) comment. I'm not arguing with the points in the article; they seem quite reasonable (unusually so, for Gruber), but there's more to this story than 'how commercially successful is Apple'.

alex_doom 14y ago
Your reasoning that Apple has fallen from grace is a personal observation that most people you know don't want one?

sgdesign 14y ago

I won't read this, because I feel like I've been reading the same exact article every day for the past year. It's not a question of fanboyism. I completely agree with everything he's saying. I just don't understand why he needs to address that Android vs Apple day after day. Am I missing something here? Does what blog X says about Apple or what magazine Y says about Samsung have any impact on the world whatsoever? John Gruber seems like a smart guy and I'm continuously baffled by his decision to devote so much time and effort to such a trivial matter.

erichocean 14y ago
Am I missing something here? He does it for page views. News at 11.
- Ygg2 14y ago
  He promotes a brand he loves and gets paid for it. But yeah, Gruber is either an Apple fanboy and/or someone profiting on other people's devotion to Apple brand.