Posted on 12/06/2009 8:05:02 AM PST by Star Traveler
Apple has the opportunity to do in mobile what Microsoft did on the desktop: Own the standard platform upon which every popular application is based. The irony of this cannot be lost on Microsoft, which has flubbed its own opportunity to do the same.
Google's Android could mount a strong charge here because it's hardware agnostic (the same way Microsoft Windows is, ironically). But otherwise it's Apple's game to lose.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Sunday, December 06, 2009 - 09:39 AM EST
"'There’s never been anything like this experience for mobile software,' Freeverse's Ian Lynch Smith says of the App Store boom. 'This is the future of digital distribution for everything: software, games, entertainment, all kinds of content,'" Jenna Wortham reports for The New York Times.
"As the App Store evolves from a kitschy catalog of novelty applications into what analysts and aficionados describe as a platform that is rapidly transforming mobile computing and telephony, it is changing the goals and testing the patience of developers, bolstering sales of the Apple motherships the applications ride upon — the iPhone and iPod Touch — and causing Apple’s competitors to overhaul their product lines and business models," Wortham reports. "It even threatens to open chinks in Apple’s own corporate armor."
"Thanks in large part to the iPhone, introduced in 2007, and the App Store, which opened its doors last year, smartphones have become the Swiss Army knives of the digital age," Wortham reports. "They provide a staggering arsenal of functions and tools at the swipe of a finger: e-mail and text messaging, video and photography, maps and turn-by-turn navigation, media and books, music and games, mobile shopping, and even wireless keys that remotely unlock cars."
Wortham reports, "'Apple changed the view of what you can do with that small phone in your back pocket,' says Katy Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst. 'Applications make the smartphone trend a revolutionary trend — one we haven’t seen in consumer technology for many years... The iPhone is changing our behavior. The game that Apple is playing is to become the Microsoft of the smartphone market.'"
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: "Apple is playing is to become the Microsoft of the smartphone market" minus the brain-numbing stupidity and total disregard for the end-users' experience.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers "James W. and "Dale E." for the heads up.]
Gib Bassett - 1:43 pm on December 5, 2009
Yesterday I came across an article on CNET titled, “In mobile, do developers or consumers matter most?” and immediately thought, “Who cares what developers think, at least the ones who want to make money?”
The article describes the oft-cited displeasure that developers have with Apple and its policies, and how it may cause defections to other platforms. Yet the article also says this about the iPhone:
“…for most consumers, their mobile device of choice is a lifestyle decision, a personal, ever-present extension of themselves…”
With the exception of the words “mobile devices,” this statement could apply equally to the clothes a consumer buys, car they drive or restaurant they frequent. For those products, does it really matter what their makers think as opposed to what consumers want? That seems like a question that answers itself when you consider as well that products require distribution channels.
The “developer versus Apple” debate so pervasive right now is missing the big picture; most developers drawn to mobile come from traditional b-to-b development organizations where for years they have become accustomed to a model “all about them,” more or less. When taken into the realm of consumer marketing, that is a dangerous point of view for anyone interested in creating successful mobile applications.
The situation reminds me of Walmart’s long-standing reputation as being difficult with its suppliers, squeezing ever smaller margins from them in exchange for access to millions of consumers.
With Apple’s App Store expected to grow three fold in 2010 to 300,000 applications, the iPhone will remain the go to platform for marketers despite the emergence of Google’s Android. When you consider the reported difficulties developers are having with Android and projections of perhaps 70,000 Android Apps in 2010, the situation isn’t likely to change.
Marketers would be wise to align themselves with mobile application developers who recognize success means taking on the perspective of the mobile customer. Such firms are more likely to possess both the technical expertise and distribution channel know how necessary to build apps that stand out from the crowd.
Like this is something to be optimistic about?
Apple controls that OS and it only runs on their phones!
It would be a disaster to be giddy about this. You have no choice in hardware, no choice in networks, no choice is customizing your phone, heck you don’t even have memory expansion slots.
Wireless companies and app developers will be doing themselves and all of us a favor by branching out to as many mobile OSs as possible (Android being a good choice because no one company dictates its total use), or they will find themselves being owned subsidiaries of Apple.
another closed, proprietary solution.
Google you listening?
I love the Iphone but it still won’t play Flash Video.
Apple makes some nice products, but the company’s propensity for control and secrecy concerns me. Thank goodness they only have about 5% of the market. If they had the 95% that Microsoft had, their desire to control every aspect of what you do with your computer and how your do it would be frightening. Google wants to control all of our information. Apple wants to control what we do with our computers. Both have the propensity for evil.
Like this is something to be optimistic about? Apple controls that OS and it only runs on their phones!
Yeah, it is... :-)
And Apple is a hardware compnay. They design and make the hardware for their products and then they supply software that intergrates better than anyone else's software. There's no good purpose trying to get crappy software to work on Apple products. Why would Apple want to put crappy software on their excellently designed and made hardware? That doesn't make any sense at all... LOL..
So, they additionally made the best software possible for their own hardware. Nothing wrong with that, except the fact that no one else can make as good hardware/software combinations as Apple does...
I guess those other companies will just have to "try harder"... :-)
It would be a disaster to be giddy about this. You have no choice in hardware, no choice in networks, no choice is customizing your phone, heck you don’t even have memory expansion slots.
Now that's funny... that you don't have any choice in hardware. You've got all the choice in the world. Apple makes its own hardware and others make theirs. People have all the choice that they want.
The fact that many consumers are picking Apple's hardware and making it the most successful in their category -- is not a "problem" -- it's called "consumer's choice"... :-)
Apple makes what the overwhelming and vast majority of these consumers are looking for in a product in that market. We can see that, very clearly, by the "numbers" from Apple coming from never having a product in that market (the iPhone) to just 2 and a half years later being at the top in that category...
Wireless companies and app developers will be doing themselves and all of us a favor by branching out to as many mobile OSs as possible (Android being a good choice because no one company dictates its total use), or they will find themselves being owned subsidiaries of Apple.
There's a market for all sorts of other manufacturers, as we can see in the iPod market, for example. They have Apple at around 70-75% of that market -- and all the other manufacturers, combined, at around 25-30% of that market. There will always been the manufacturers who don't know how to design things for the vast majority of the consumers and there will always be a few that stumble into those other manufacturers market niche... LOL...
I love the Iphone but it still won’t play Flash Video.
Yeah, and I'm glad it won't... :-)
YouTube has changed their videos to play the open standard of the MP4 file and that should be what is played for movie files on the Internet. Those work just fine on the websites and with the iPhone. They've got a "YouTube" application on iPhone, too...
But, I suspect that some "others" who complain about Flash actually want an "end run" around how Apple puts applications on the iPhone. These developers want to develop things through Flash and bypass the Apple Store... and that isn't going to happen.
I wouldn't buy into the "Flash" thing as a legitimate complaint for the iPhone. I never did like it on my web browsers and I've got it blocked where I can block it so it won't show up. That makes me so much happier to block Flash... :-)
Google you listening?
Yeah, they're listening...
Android is headed for the distinction of being the "porn phone" for the mobile market... :-) since Apple doesn't let porn in their Apple iPhone store...
Go ahead Android, become the porn phone for the industry... LOL...
See one FReeper article here...
Android goes for iPhone weak spot: porn apps [Porn is iPhone Killer?]
Apple, both with their OS and with their iPhone, only allows their OS to run on their own hardware.
That means that the iPhone can never be the "Windows of Mobile" until they allow the iPhone OS to run on third party hardware.
Wake me when there is an LG phone running iPhone OS.
Well I’m all glad you are all smiles and giggles over your Apple toy, but most people, you know the % that doesn’t use Apple phones, seem to prefer a choice of devices that can run different platforms just as well as the iPhone on more powerful hardware with the ability to expand our devices capabilities and not have to call it “jail breaking”.
Congratulations to Apple for having the best disciples to parrot how awesome their phone, that has not changed significantly since 2007, is compared to ones they likely never even used, because at this point the only thing pushing it are cheerleaders, me too buyers still thinking it still the “cool” thing to have, and boasting about 100,000 “apps” few of which are anymore useful than your typical Windows freeware program.
... but most people, you know the % that doesn’t use Apple phones, seem to prefer a choice of devices that can run different platforms ...
We can see which way that graph is going for the iPhone -- from having absolutely nothing in the market at the end of June of 2007 to now... quite impressive and on a rocket ride upward... (as we can see...).
Microsoft allows Windows to run on anybody's platform that wishes to run it.
Apple, both with their OS and with their iPhone, only allows their OS to run on their own hardware.
But as most people never "get" -- is that Microsoft doesn't design and manufacture the phones. That's what Apple does. It's a "hardware" company that supplies the best software to make their "hardware work"...
Apple doesn't want crappy software on their hardware that they've made in such an excellent fashion. So, they have to make their own software since no one else has been able to do as good as Apple.
So, you've got a complaint -- it seems -- with the fact that no one else can make as good software as Apple needs on their fine products... LOL...
Too each his own.As a consumer I have the final decision as to what I want to view or listen to on my IPhone,Apple does not.
I went to a site this morning to check out a certain product and unfortunately I was not able to see it in action because it required a flash video player and as previously discussed Apple doesn’t have it.
The Apple developers and techs I work with who go to all of the conferences say that there is some bad blood between the Adobe Flash developers and some of the more senior Apple people which is causing this. If they could ever get that worked out the iPhone would clearly be the dominant device.
Yeah... LOL...
I'm sure the "bad blood" is that the Adobe Flash team wants to hold to their ability to bypass the Apple iPhone store and be able to develop applications for the iPhone by way of Flash... :-)
The "bad blood" is that the Flash team realizes that Apple is not going to let them do that... LOL...
My iPhone is great except for one thing... AT&T. There are many places even in my area close to the east coast that don’t get a decent signal.
Apple will have to go with Verizon to keep their lead in the smart phone industry.
Thank goodness they only have about 5% of the market.
In the Macintosh market, they're climbing rapidly and have 9-10% of the market in the U.S. And in the Apple Retail store (that Apple has themselves) their figures show that over 50% of the sales of Macintosh are to former Windows users. In addition I see the geeks rapidly coming over to the Mac OS X platform. They like it that they can run Windows, Linux and Macintosh all on one machine. You can even run your Windows application at the same time that you're running the Mac OS X and its applications and you can't tell that they are running any differently than a normal application (running two systems transparently side-by-side)... :-)
So, that's been changing rapidly for over the last decade. And there are no signs of it slowing down. That means that the Apple Macintosh has a lot of room to grow into and that Windows has nowhere to go but down, down, down...
In the iPod market (the MP3 players) the Apple products have around 70-75% of the entire market. All the other manufacturers combined have (added up together) only about 25-30% of the market.
With the iTunes Store (for movies and music) -- Apple just surpassed Walmart and become the NUMBER ONE seller/store for music of all the sellers/stores in the country.
And with the iPhone product, Apple had absolutey nothing in the market at the end of June of 2007, and they are now rapidly becoming the top vendor and manufacturer for that product in that market segment of all the other manufacturers.
So, as you can see... Apple is quite widespread and very dominant in the consumer electronics area, in those products that it does manufacture. And Apple is primarily a "hardware" company (don't ever forget that) and this is what drives Apple and how it markets its products.
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