6 ms·

Apple Chiefs Discuss Strategy, Market Share, and the New iPhones

37 points by olivercameron 13y ago

cliveowen 13y ago
I'm sick of people talking about iPhone's market share only to follow it up with "Android, meanwhile, continues to increase its market share". You're comparing an OS with a product, that's like comparing the market share of a Hyundai sedan with the market share of Shell fuel (if the Hyundai sedan could only work with a given brand of fuel). It doesn't make sense and it doesn't serve any purpose.
- alexandros 13y ago
  It does if you're thinking what OS/market to code your app for. If Apple doesn't license it's OS to other manufacturers, that's their business decision, but they are (also) an OS maker nonetheless.
- devx 13y ago
  Well I seem to remember there was a time beating iOS as a whole was hard to believe, and some still think that's true for tablets, even though Android already has more market share in tablets (each quarter, not yet in total userbase), and it's only a matter of time until it more or less replicates the success in smartphones. This would've happened sooner, if Google's employees weren't so dense to think that they don't have to do anything to push Android tablets, and thinking that devs only need to let their phone apps scale to tablets, which in hindsight I'm sure they also realize what a stupid statement that was at the time.
  - czr80 13y ago
    When? iOS never had the dominant share (globally) - that passed from Symbian to Android.
  - r00fus 13y ago
    I don't remember such a thing. If it was, it was brief. For the longest time, smartphones ran Symbian, PalmOS, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile (order varied by year). Android phones largely took marketshare from the above. The original 2006 prototype looked largely like one of the devices above (mainly the blackberry) [1]. It was only after the iPhone that Android pivoted hard towards away from embedded keyboards. [1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_prototype_revealed_during_google_oracle_trial.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_proto...
- ZeroGravitas 13y ago
  iPhone isn't a product, it's a product family, like Samsung Galaxy. iPhone 5c, or iPad 3 or iPod Touch 5th Gen are products, and they all happen to run iOS, which is an OS, like Android.
ackfoo 13y ago
Pure damage control. Steve Jobs had a brain and a backbone to go with it. Not sure the current crop do. I hope they find someone with vision and an expiry date to inoculate Apple against the stupidity of business people.
- threeseed 13y ago
  I always find it so hilarious watching people go down this "if Steve Jobs was alive he would never do this" path. Because as was documented in his biography Apple's current strategy was at minimum signed off by Steve. And more than likely he was fully involved in crafting it. But hey I am sure you're much smarter than the same management and design teams that has been in places during the invention of the iPod, iPad and iPhone.
- blinkingled 13y ago
  Sounds like the management has installed Gruber and MG as their sources for getting talking points! Hopefully just talking points and not strategy. Case in point - “For us, it matters that people use our products. We really want to enrich people’s lives, and you can’t enrich somebody’s life if the product is in the drawer.” That's bull. Apple doesn't really benefit from people using web on their iOS devices. They benefit from selling hardware. Let aside the validity of such "surveys" ( do they count Chinese and Indian web traffic and how? Because thats where growth is.) - even if they were valid it isn't anything for Apple to bank on.
  - Sevores 13y ago
    > Apple doesn't really benefit from people using web on their iOS devices. Not directly. But if you buy a tablet and it sits in the drawer, you probably won't buy the next one.
    - slantyyz 13y ago
      >> Not directly. But if you buy a tablet and it sits in the drawer, you probably won't buy the next one. Yes. Most of what I did on my iPad 1 was surf. Upgrading to iOS 5 killed my iPad (Safari crashes constantly) and it basically went into the drawer. iOS4 killed my iPhone 3G in an even more dramatic fashion. While those OS upgrades happened in the age of Forstall, it is no longer a foregone conclusion that I would upgrade to an iPhone or iPad. It used to be an easy decision, but now that there is more parity among platforms (compared to say, 2010), it's that much more important for Apple to ensure that people can continue using their device. Hopefully with OS upgrades in the age of Federighi, we won't see as many performance crippling major releases as we have in the past.
podperson 13y ago
The constant comparison of iPhone vs. Android to Mac vs. Windows is tiresome. Mac never had more than 15% market share. Microsoft won 95% market share not on its merits, but on the back of IBM's pre-existing mindshare dominance. So let's just put that idiotic comparison to rest. It's just as obviously not iPod vs. Zune, right? (And despite never having had much market share, virtually every Windows program anyone uses started life as a Mac program and was ported to Windows, from Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark XPress, to the GUI version of Microsoft Word. Even Windows programs everyone hates, such as Flash, were developed on the Mac. Not DOOM though -- that was written on a NeXT Machine.) As it is right now, Apple enjoys well over 10% of the cell phone market (depending on how you measure it, they are the dominant vendor in the US), having aimed initially for 1% of the smart phone market. They have something like 70% of the app market (in dollar terms). And they're doing it with a BMW strategy, not a GM strategy. You may recall GM recently went bankrupt while having the largest share of the US auto market. (Oh and how about Mac vs Amiga? Amiga vastly outsold Mac for several years and then Commodore went bankrupt.) And most of this happened post-Jobs.
- leoc 13y ago
  The Mac vs. Windows comparison is imperfect of course, but as quick comparisons go I believe it's an excellent one and highly relevant. It doesn't necessarily imply that Apple is going to become unprofitable again (stock price declines are another matter): it's more likely to find itself back in its year-2000 holding position than it is to crash in the short or medium term. You're right about the influence of the Mac as an app platform. In fact, while people tend to think of Microsoft as an OS company thanks to MS-DOS in many ways MS is fundamentally a Macintosh ISV (a good Macintosh ISV, mind you) with delusions of grandeur. But then again, all these companies and pieces of software moved fairly happily to Windows-first when the platform and the market was there for them. You're right that the Jobs issue is largely a red herring at this stage.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    Apple was never the big loser to Microsoft. Commodore was the true loser if you are looking at market share. We get to talk about Apple because they survived and successfully transitioned to a new product line. Commodore couldn't do that with the Amiga.
ZeroGravitas 13y ago
“One thing that clearly surprised Apple and everyone else was how quickly Android took off,” says analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco, a research firm in Helsinki. Maybe they spent too much time reading Asymco, who predicted Android would never attain more than 15% of the market and would have less than Windows. "What do you have to believe for an Android dominated future?": http://www.asymco.com/2010/11/03/what-do-you-have-to-believe-for-an-android-dominated-future/ http://www.asymco.com/2010/11/03/what-do-you-have-to-believe...
- pinaceae 13y ago
  if you read his piece, back in 2010, it still was believed that RIM and Nokia could hold their marketshare through BB and Windows Mobile. what mr. dediu did not foresee was the complete ineptitude of two major players to accomplish anything. billions of dollars were wasted by these companies, it is quite amazing. therein lies the reason for nokia being gone in 2013 and blackberry laying off 40% of its staff. the technology world is quite remarkable in its speed of change and unbelievablly massive changes of output quality. a market-defining leader can turn to a pile of steaming shit within a couple of years. imagine BMW producing Lada-style cars within the next product cycle. and this closes the circle to the BW piece and Mr.Cook's statement - innovate or die.
- czr80 13y ago
  So, I read the article and your summary is very poor - quite intellectually dishonest, really. He clearly lays out the conditions which would have to hold for Android to grow significantly, and it turned out that they were met (Nokia collapsed, Windows proved unable to compete with free, and Samsung was able to establish a viable Android business)
  - Kylekramer 13y ago
    Well, that interpretation of the article ignores how Deidu was constantly saying it is unlikely these conditions would come to be (he says "unlikely" that Android licensing will beat Windows Phone's licensing, Android dominating is "wishful thinking"). Seems like your view is Deidu couldn't be wrong. If Android didn't become very successful, Deidu predicted it. If Android did, Deidu predicted it merely by saying there was a small possibility of it happening.
S_A_P 13y ago
I suffer from mobile device analysis fatigue. Further who are all these analysts that get quoted in these articles? Is that their job to take stock of the mobile space and say things like “One thing that clearly surprised Apple and everyone else was how quickly Android took off,” says analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco, a research firm in Helsinki. Did he talk to Apple? did they call him and say "Horace, this really surprised us." This is just pure speculation and a ridiculous statement.

37 points by olivercameron 13y ago

I'm sick of people talking about iPhone's market share only to follow it up with "Android, meanwhile, continues to increase its market share". You're comparing an OS with a product, that's like comparing the market share of a Hyundai sedan with the market share of Shell fuel (if the Hyundai sedan could only work with a given brand of fuel). It doesn't make sense and it doesn't serve any purpose.

alexandros 13y ago
It does if you're thinking what OS/market to code your app for. If Apple doesn't license it's OS to other manufacturers, that's their business decision, but they are (also) an OS maker nonetheless.
devx 13y ago
Well I seem to remember there was a time beating iOS as a whole was hard to believe, and some still think that's true for tablets, even though Android already has more market share in tablets (each quarter, not yet in total userbase), and it's only a matter of time until it more or less replicates the success in smartphones. This would've happened sooner, if Google's employees weren't so dense to think that they don't have to do anything to push Android tablets, and thinking that devs only need to let their phone apps scale to tablets, which in hindsight I'm sure they also realize what a stupid statement that was at the time.
- czr80 13y ago
  When? iOS never had the dominant share (globally) - that passed from Symbian to Android.
- r00fus 13y ago
  I don't remember such a thing. If it was, it was brief. For the longest time, smartphones ran Symbian, PalmOS, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile (order varied by year). Android phones largely took marketshare from the above. The original 2006 prototype looked largely like one of the devices above (mainly the blackberry) [1]. It was only after the iPhone that Android pivoted hard towards away from embedded keyboards. [1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_prototype_revealed_during_google_oracle_trial.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_proto...
ZeroGravitas 13y ago
iPhone isn't a product, it's a product family, like Samsung Galaxy. iPhone 5c, or iPad 3 or iPod Touch 5th Gen are products, and they all happen to run iOS, which is an OS, like Android.

ackfoo 13y ago

Pure damage control. Steve Jobs had a brain and a backbone to go with it. Not sure the current crop do. I hope they find someone with vision and an expiry date to inoculate Apple against the stupidity of business people.

threeseed 13y ago
I always find it so hilarious watching people go down this "if Steve Jobs was alive he would never do this" path. Because as was documented in his biography Apple's current strategy was at minimum signed off by Steve. And more than likely he was fully involved in crafting it. But hey I am sure you're much smarter than the same management and design teams that has been in places during the invention of the iPod, iPad and iPhone.
blinkingled 13y ago
Sounds like the management has installed Gruber and MG as their sources for getting talking points! Hopefully just talking points and not strategy. Case in point - “For us, it matters that people use our products. We really want to enrich people’s lives, and you can’t enrich somebody’s life if the product is in the drawer.” That's bull. Apple doesn't really benefit from people using web on their iOS devices. They benefit from selling hardware. Let aside the validity of such "surveys" ( do they count Chinese and Indian web traffic and how? Because thats where growth is.) - even if they were valid it isn't anything for Apple to bank on.
- Sevores 13y ago
  > Apple doesn't really benefit from people using web on their iOS devices. Not directly. But if you buy a tablet and it sits in the drawer, you probably won't buy the next one.
  - slantyyz 13y ago
    >> Not directly. But if you buy a tablet and it sits in the drawer, you probably won't buy the next one. Yes. Most of what I did on my iPad 1 was surf. Upgrading to iOS 5 killed my iPad (Safari crashes constantly) and it basically went into the drawer. iOS4 killed my iPhone 3G in an even more dramatic fashion. While those OS upgrades happened in the age of Forstall, it is no longer a foregone conclusion that I would upgrade to an iPhone or iPad. It used to be an easy decision, but now that there is more parity among platforms (compared to say, 2010), it's that much more important for Apple to ensure that people can continue using their device. Hopefully with OS upgrades in the age of Federighi, we won't see as many performance crippling major releases as we have in the past.

podperson 13y ago

The constant comparison of iPhone vs. Android to Mac vs. Windows is tiresome. Mac never had more than 15% market share. Microsoft won 95% market share not on its merits, but on the back of IBM's pre-existing mindshare dominance. So let's just put that idiotic comparison to rest. It's just as obviously not iPod vs. Zune, right? (And despite never having had much market share, virtually every Windows program anyone uses started life as a Mac program and was ported to Windows, from Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark XPress, to the GUI version of Microsoft Word. Even Windows programs everyone hates, such as Flash, were developed on the Mac. Not DOOM though -- that was written on a NeXT Machine.) As it is right now, Apple enjoys well over 10% of the cell phone market (depending on how you measure it, they are the dominant vendor in the US), having aimed initially for 1% of the smart phone market. They have something like 70% of the app market (in dollar terms). And they're doing it with a BMW strategy, not a GM strategy. You may recall GM recently went bankrupt while having the largest share of the US auto market. (Oh and how about Mac vs Amiga? Amiga vastly outsold Mac for several years and then Commodore went bankrupt.) And most of this happened post-Jobs.

leoc 13y ago
The Mac vs. Windows comparison is imperfect of course, but as quick comparisons go I believe it's an excellent one and highly relevant. It doesn't necessarily imply that Apple is going to become unprofitable again (stock price declines are another matter): it's more likely to find itself back in its year-2000 holding position than it is to crash in the short or medium term. You're right about the influence of the Mac as an app platform. In fact, while people tend to think of Microsoft as an OS company thanks to MS-DOS in many ways MS is fundamentally a Macintosh ISV (a good Macintosh ISV, mind you) with delusions of grandeur. But then again, all these companies and pieces of software moved fairly happily to Windows-first when the platform and the market was there for them. You're right that the Jobs issue is largely a red herring at this stage.
- protomyth 13y ago
  Apple was never the big loser to Microsoft. Commodore was the true loser if you are looking at market share. We get to talk about Apple because they survived and successfully transitioned to a new product line. Commodore couldn't do that with the Amiga.

ZeroGravitas 13y ago

“One thing that clearly surprised Apple and everyone else was how quickly Android took off,” says analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco, a research firm in Helsinki. Maybe they spent too much time reading Asymco, who predicted Android would never attain more than 15% of the market and would have less than Windows. "What do you have to believe for an Android dominated future?": http://www.asymco.com/2010/11/03/what-do-you-have-to-believe-for-an-android-dominated-future/ http://www.asymco.com/2010/11/03/what-do-you-have-to-believe...

pinaceae 13y ago
if you read his piece, back in 2010, it still was believed that RIM and Nokia could hold their marketshare through BB and Windows Mobile. what mr. dediu did not foresee was the complete ineptitude of two major players to accomplish anything. billions of dollars were wasted by these companies, it is quite amazing. therein lies the reason for nokia being gone in 2013 and blackberry laying off 40% of its staff. the technology world is quite remarkable in its speed of change and unbelievablly massive changes of output quality. a market-defining leader can turn to a pile of steaming shit within a couple of years. imagine BMW producing Lada-style cars within the next product cycle. and this closes the circle to the BW piece and Mr.Cook's statement - innovate or die.
czr80 13y ago
So, I read the article and your summary is very poor - quite intellectually dishonest, really. He clearly lays out the conditions which would have to hold for Android to grow significantly, and it turned out that they were met (Nokia collapsed, Windows proved unable to compete with free, and Samsung was able to establish a viable Android business)
- Kylekramer 13y ago
  Well, that interpretation of the article ignores how Deidu was constantly saying it is unlikely these conditions would come to be (he says "unlikely" that Android licensing will beat Windows Phone's licensing, Android dominating is "wishful thinking"). Seems like your view is Deidu couldn't be wrong. If Android didn't become very successful, Deidu predicted it. If Android did, Deidu predicted it merely by saying there was a small possibility of it happening.

S_A_P 13y ago

I suffer from mobile device analysis fatigue. Further who are all these analysts that get quoted in these articles? Is that their job to take stock of the mobile space and say things like “One thing that clearly surprised Apple and everyone else was how quickly Android took off,” says analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco, a research firm in Helsinki. Did he talk to Apple? did they call him and say "Horace, this really surprised us." This is just pure speculation and a ridiculous statement.