Yes, and just as in the desktop computer market, Apple is more profitable (and still here), whereas one hardware vendor after another has dropped dead of margin compression in the cutthroat “open” PC hardware market.
Dell was just taken private, BTW. That’s a symbol of the problems of the PC market and commodity tech devices. Market share at the expense of profit margins isn’t a sustainable business model.
I expect to see the same thing that’s happened in PC hardware happen all over again in smartphones. It will take another couple years, but the first two to fall dead will likely be Nokia and RIMM. After that, I expect Google’s investment in Motorola to largely go forward and down, as they downshift into low-cost, mediocre devices:
There’s a reason why IBM is still around after all these years: The people at IBM understand that you have to make a profit to stick around. Everyone else that has gone up against IBM has repeated the mistakes the public saw in the PC industry (which were also done in the minicomputer industry, and then the Unix workstation sector) and we’re now starting to see in the smartphone sector.
How many mainframes does IBM ship? Not many. What’s their share of the computing market? Tiny.
What’s their profit margin on mainframe sales? Freakin’ huge, that’s what.
Same deal for Apple. As long as they keep making products which people will buy, even at a supposed ‘premium’ to the commodity market, and they maintain an actual profit margin, they’ll be around.
BTW, I’ve seen the “Google buys Moto, promises to not compete with hardware partners” BS before. It ain’t gonna fly with the other smartphone hardware companies. Their natural response will be to start rolling their own s/w and eventually leave “official” Android behind and become their own s/w vendors as well. I’d wager the first hardware company to leave Google’s official Android s/w behind will be Samsung. We can already see the signs in the latest Samsung offerings. If Google wanted to keep the whip hand on the software, they had to do only *one* thing: not compete with their partners. That’s it.
That’s all they had to do... but they screwed that up. T
The whole smartphone industry is like the computer industry of the last 40 years... on steroids for size and meth for speed. But even for all that, it’s looking just like what I’ve seen (and lived) in the computer industry ‘n’ times before.
I honestly think Amazon will be the first to try to break Android.
Still, I don’t like Apple. Just never really liked the interface and controls. To each his own.