Tag Archives: android

Coffee Time: Market Share vs Profit

November 17, 2011 – 2:22 pm

Coffee Time: Market Share vs Profit – journal – minimally minimal.

Have to love his last set of images, comparing Apple’s product line to Samsung’s. Thanks to John Gruber for linking to this.

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Apple doesn’t counter anyone. They lead; everyone else follows.

October 12, 2011 – 2:07 pm

Spurred by the recently announced Amazon Kindle Fire and its $199 price, Apple is rumored to be exploring a new low-cost iPad for release in the first few months of 2012.

Analyst Brian White with Ticonderoga Securities has been touring China and Taiwan and meeting with component suppliers, where he has heard rumblings of a so-called “iPad mini” arriving next year. The “mini” name doesn’t necessarily refer to the size of the device, he said, but a lower entry-level price.

He said such a device is expected to arrive in the first few months of 2012, allowing Apple to tap into a “more price sensitive consumer segment,” and also fend off the Amazon Kindle Fire, the retailer’s first entrance into the touchscreen tablet market.

via AppleInsider

This sort of thing is so stupid I don’t even know where to start.

Or maybe I do. First and foremost, Apple doesn’t build new products because it’s “spurred” by someone else’s products. If there were a lower-cost iPad coming next year, it would have been in development for some time.

Knee-jerk reaction is what other companies do.

Second, rumors like this always assume that price is something that companies simply pluck out thin air, as if making things for less than you sell them weren’t important. Believe me, if Apple could make the current iPad cheaper without sacrificing quality, it would. But it can’t, so it won’t.

The Fire will sell quite well, I’m sure, but not because it’s any threat to the iPad.

Amazon can make cheap tablets until it’s blue in the face, because Amazon is fine with losing money on every tablet sold. They make it up on the content you buy. While Apple makes a small profit on the content, its main source of income has always been on the hardware itself. It can’t afford to lose money on cheap iPads in the hopes that you buy lots of iBooks and music. And it wouldn’t want to, because that would mean selling cheap crap, which is antithetical to everything Apple is.

So, maybe, maybe, we could see a small price drop on the entry level iPad next year. Maybe they’ll continue to sell the iPad 2 at a cheaper rate when they release the iPad 3, like they do with iPhones. But don’t expect a $199 iPad from Apple next year. It’s just not in the cards. And it doesn’t have to be, because Kindle Fire buyers aren’t going to take away any sales from potential iPad owners.

The only companies that will suffer from the Kindle Fire are all the other Android makers. (And suffer they will.)

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The phone screen size lab experiment

September 7, 2011 – 2:17 pm

Vendors are trying to figure out what works when it comes to screen sizes, according to Geoff Blaber, analyst at CCS Insight.One of the big product trends at IFA was screen sizes between 4.5 inches and 5.5 inches, which include the LTE version of Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy S II, HTC’s Windows Phone-based Titan, Samsung’s Galaxy Note and the Tablet P from Sony, which has two 5-inch screens.

via Macworld

It’s fun to watch all these other companies just now get around to performing the research that Apple did prior to its 2007 launch of the iPhone. Only, instead of testing all these screen sizes in the lab, making a clear determination on which one they felt people would find most useable, they are simply releasing every size of screen imaginable on the general public, hoping one of them will hit it big.

What they’re going to find is what Apple found out four years ago. 3.5 inches is where you want to be. Sure, a 4.5-inch screen might be a bit easier to see for people with poor near sight, but it makes the device harder to pocket, hurts battery life, and most importantly, is harder to manipulate with your hands, unless you have gigantic hands.

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Om Malik gets more details about the Motorola acquisition

August 15, 2011 – 8:20 pm

The high-level talks between Google and Motorola started about five weeks ago. Google CEO Larry Page and Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha were talking directly, and only a handful of executives were brought into discussions. Our sources suggest that Android co-founder Andy Rubin was brought into the talks only very recently.

via gigaom.com

Like I said earlier, this move was more about defense than any sort of long-term mastermind plan, as suggested by the delusional Dan Lyons.

The short span of time suggests that this was a REACTION to losing the Nortel bid, not part of the Nortel original plans. And the fact that they didn’t even bring in their key Android executive until late in the process suggests that it was, as I said before, a gut reaction, rather than a well-considered tactical move. They are panicking over there, and it’s starting to show. Honeycomb 3.0 was a disaster. Google is gaining no traction in the tablet space. Mobile phone market share growth—the only stat where Google was clearly winning—has slowed (even after rigging the numbers by counting cheap Chinese knockoffs as Android phones.) Microsoft is clearly still trying to muscle its way into the space, and could even still carve a niche for itself, especially if it keeps trying to buy more of Google’s partners. And even with strong market share, Google is still making little money with the Android initiative.

This Motorola purchase could very well backfire on Google, or it could turn out well, if they play their cards right. The problem is, Google has never been any good at the cards.

So it all depends on whether Google is ready to take Android into the territory of a “walled garden” as so many like to call the Apple approach. Drop the other partners, start making “Google” phones for real. Didn’t work for the Nexus series, but then again, the most dedicated Android fans all say that the Nexus phones were better than anything else out there. Maybe they can pull that off, but I doubt it. Not without a retail strategy in place.

That does seem to be the eventual plan, though. The question is, what happens in the short term to Google’s numbers if HTC, Samsung, etc. see the writing on the wall and jump ship before Google can get a decent line of Motorola Android phones going?

And what will all those Google fanboys say when Android suddenly becomes available on only one brand of phones?

The most important thing we can take away from all of this is that Google is not playing on its own turf. It no longer controls Android’s destiny, if it ever did. Apple is still the only company in tech playing offense.

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Dan Lyons is delusional—but you knew that already, didn’t you?

August 15, 2011 – 3:27 pm

And today it all makes sense. Google just sandbagged its rivals. The whole thing was a rope-a-dope maneuver. Google never cared about the Nortel patents. It just wanted to drive up the price so that AppleSoft (those happy new bedmates) would overpay. Today, with the Motorola deal, Google picks up nearly three times as many patents as AppleSoft got from Novell and Nortel. More important, Google just raised the stakes in a huge way for anyone who wants to stay in the smartphone market.

Better yet, Google got its rivals to spend a few weeks defending the practice of using patents to attack other companies. Apple fanboys bent over backward to say that Apple was doing the honorable thing here by suing everyone in sight. All this slimy patent warfare that is so despicable when others do it becomes magically noble when Apple does it. Teaming up with other companies, including the evil Borg, to gang up on Google is all perfectly legitimate, par for the course, smart business practice, blah blah.

So now Google fires back, makes a huge acquisition, gets into the hardware business, buys up the best IP portfolio in the mobile space — and can position itself as a victim that’s just trying to defend itself against this gang of bullies.

via realdanlyons.com

And people say Apple fanboys drink the Kool Aid.

Let’s start with “nearly three times the patents.” Yes, Google acquires nearly three times the patents in this deal than they would have from Nortel. They also paid nearly three times as much. (12.5 billion vs. 4.2 billion. AND they wouldn’t have been on the hook for that entire 4.2 billion; they could have joined the consortium and paid a fraction of that.)

Next: “Google just raised the stakes in a huge way for anyone who wants to stay in the smartphone market.” Huh? They’re playing catchup here. Nothing more. Our broken patent system and the recent influx of patent troll companies raised the stakes over a year ago, and Google was losing—badly. Remember, this is the company that claims to not believe in patents; in order for Google to “win” on its own terms, or to “raise the stakes” it would have had to do something that made patents irrelevant, not just drop a bomb of cash to play along by everyone else’s rules.

I’m not faulting Google for playing along, mind you; they really didn’t have any choice. But to say this is some brilliant maneuver is silly. It’s defense, plain and simple. And it’s a risky defense at that, considering how it will certainly strain Google’s relationships with other hardware partners.

Next: “Apple fanboys bent over backwards to say that Apple was doing the honorable thing.” NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE has said that any of Apple’s behavior when it comes to patents has been “honorable.” I’ve seen lots of defenses along the lines of “well, the system is broken, and Apple just has to play within the confines of the system” type arguments. But that’s a long shot from calling any side in the patent war “honorable.”

And finally: Google can “position itself as a victim that’s just trying to defend itself against a gang of bullies.” Yeah, that, or they can position themselves as a bunch of whiny hypocrites who once claimed that patents were evil, but now are going to start using the very evil they once denounced to kill off smaller competitors like Microsoft, HP, RIM. Once again, Google does what is best for Google, and everyone else can go stick it. “Don’t be evil” my ass.

My guess is that most Apple fans will see Google’s move as interesting, albeit unimaginative. They lost HUGE in the Nortel thing, so they turned around and made a somewhat bold and probably not completely well thought out acquisition to remedy their mistake. They dropped a lot more money and added baggage to already strained partner relationships because they don’t know how to play the game properly.

It fits into Google’s usual pattern. Smart people, lousy at politics. The question is whether the long-term benefit of having better legal defenses will outweigh the strain this move will put on partners like HTC, Samsung, etc.

Remember, not too many people were suing Google, anyway. Most of the suing has been between Apple, Microsoft, and Google’s partners. This acquisition doesn’t protect HTC or Samsung at all. If Google starts filing motions to intervene in those lawsuits, than I’ll be happy to call that move “honorable.” Somehow, I don’t see that happening, though.

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