Posts Tagged ‘Google’
The Rise of Digital Civilizations Will Define Our Post-PC Future
Everyone knows the biggest battles in technology are today being fought by a small number of large organizations. We intuitively know who these great powers are: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and maybe Microsoft. But we’re not so clear on what it is that makes those particular companies the key protagonists rather than other equally large digital companies — Samsung, Sony, Nokia and Yahoo! among them — who appear to be sidelined.
Calling this a battle, or “The Great Tech War of 2012″, misses the point. It’s far too negative a sentiment when these companies’ main focus is on long term strategy. They are aiming to construct a future in which their products and profits will prosper.
These great digital powers are now building Digital Civilizations, rather than a series of mere products, individual platforms or even ecosystems (around a platform). They are pursuing strategies that reach far beyond the confines of existing markets. They are causing widespread market collisions as they push industries to overlap, merge or cease to exist. They are outflanking and disrupting companies that follow less ambitious corporate strategies.
These new Digital Civilizations use identity to tie numerous disparate products, many devices, multiple platforms and product portfolios together into their long term strategy. Each Civilization has hundreds of millions of active users — often with credit cards attached — far more than even the largest telecom operators or media companies. They straddle industries rather than operating within legacy market sectors. They have an organizing ideology underlying their strategy that motivates and attracts talented employees, excites partners, and is the foundation for the marketing that entices users to become their customers.
What defines these Digital Civilizations? What makes them new and different? Many organizations, companies, industry consortiums, and companies have parts of this strategy in place within their current products. But the new Digital Civilizations have all of the following characteristics: Read the rest of this entry »
Sony Takes Control of the Future, Its Mobile Play
After ten years as a joint venture, Sony has bought out partner Ericsson to take sole charge of mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson. The split appears amicable. Sony gains full control of the products plus access and/or ownership of numerous patents. Ericsson receives Euro 1.05bn ($1.45bn) for its stake.
This move is even more important for Sony group than for Sony Ericsson itself.
Mobile phone technology is becoming ubiquitous. Similarly, digital media is becoming personal as smart mobile devices are a mainstream way of reading, viewing, and listening to media. Mobile phone connectivity is being integrated into everything from eReaders, tablets computers, to portable games consoles and beyond. Soon, no area of consumer electronics will be untouched by mobile’s reach. Sony group makes many of these consumer devices, including the upcoming PSP Vita handheld games console that includes a 3G mobile phone radio and eReaders that compete with the 3G-enabled Amazon Kindle.
The future is mobile and personal. Sony needs the competencies that Sony Ericsson has worked for years to nurture. Equally SonyEricsson needs the unreserved commitment of Sony to ensure that its smartphones — now 80% of Sony Ericsson’s shipments — intelligently tie into all of a person’s digital life: on Sony TVs, on notebook PCs, tablets, music, gaming and other media.
HTC demonstrates the importance of digital media for smartphones and tablets:
The BlackBerry BIS Outage is a Bigger Threat to RIM than the iPhone 4S or Android Ice Cream
RIM’s BlackBerry customers are experiencing a further outage as the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) fails again (BBC News coverage) for the second day of problems. The issues started yesterday, on Canadian Thanksgiving. RIM is a Canadian company. These service faults cover a wide geographical region across Europe, Middle East and Africa but not North America. BIS is the network service that powers consumer email, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), and other BlackBerry Internet functions for consumers. SMS and voice calling is unaffected.
This isn’t the first such problem with BIS (or see here), but the timing is horrific, for multiple reasons:
- BBM rival iMessage arrives tomorrow on Wednesday, October 12. iMessage is a part of the iOS5 update for iPhones, iPads and recent iPod Touch models. Similarly to Facetime’s integration with voice telephony, iMessage replaces an iPhone’s SMS app and automatically delivers the improved messaging experience if the phone knows a recipient is also an iMessage user. It also uses Apple’s cloud service to sync messages across the iPad and iPod Touch that lack SMS messaging ability.
- The new version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, is imminent. While Apple is the key competitor for all high end smartphones, it’s Android-powered phones that threaten to eat into RIM’s Curve & BBM toting young customers.
- RIM is suffering a fall in device unit shipments. That’s perhaps too mild a summary, RIM has reported a terrible set of results for its most recent quarter combined with appalling sales for the PlayBook tablet. RIM needs to be able to devote its resources and prestige to expand with new innovations and not run to stand still by patching old services such as BIS for existing users.
- RIM is midway through a risky technology transition. Current BlackBerry smartphones run an evolved version of the same software they have for years. The new QNX software is in development and is on which RIM’s future depends. RIM will have to persuade current users to transition to this new product range that will almost certainly have some irritations for long term users, even if QNX smartphones are excellently executed. Long term users often dislike small changes that new users wouldn’t notice.
Mobile Metadata Monday: Apple latest; Nielsen & Comscore Smartphones; JD Power Phone Satisfaction
Today’s round-up of recent wireless, smartphone, tablet, and other mobile data.
There’s a summary of the data at the top with more figures, analysis and links to all of the sources included further down after the break.
1. comScore: August 2011 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share
In one of its key countries, the US, RIM is really struggling. RIM sees a decline of 1% in share of the mobile handset market and a dramatic 5% fall in share of smartphone OS platforms in just a three month period. But these figures pre-date the introduction of RIM’s completely new portfolio of low end Curves and higher end Bold’s and Torch’s all running BlackBerry OS 7.
Despite widespread sentiment that Apple is losing out to Android in the US, the company’s share of the total US mobile market edged up by 0.7% between May and August. This reflects continued strength for the iPhone 4 although the handset design is a year old.
2. Apple: Latest iOS, iPhone and other Apple statistics from the “Let’s Talk iPhone” event
Apple’s own figures from the iPhone 4S launch re-enforce how well it was doing on the eve of Steve Job’s death. Some of the many metrics (many stats further down after the break):
- 250m iOS devices sold, including iPads, iPhones and iPod Touch models.
- 18m total app downloads cumulatively.
- 500,000 iOS apps in the store, of which 140,000 are for the iPad.
- 67m Game Center users.
- >16bn songs sold by the iTunes music store.
- $3bn paid out by App to app developers to date
3. Nielsen: In U.S. Market, New Smartphone Buyers Increasingly Embracing Android
Data on new smartphone buyers shows that Android is growing dramatically and now represents 56% of recent smartphone acquirers. However, Apple is maintaining its smartphone market share (28%) when comparing recent smartphone acquirers and all smartphone subscribers. Result: More bad news for RIM and Microsoft Windows Phone, it’s these other smartphone platforms that are being squeezed by the rise of Android, not Apple.
4. J.D. Power: The Right Blend of Design and Technology is Critical to Creating an Exceptional User Experience with Smartphones and Traditional Mobile Devices
Customer satisfaction is greatest for thin and light devices, even among smartphone users. Current feature phone owners demonstrate the same trend as smartphone owners for portable devices but have a lower tolerance for weight with their satisfaction levels dropping off when devices weigh over 4 ounces compared with a threshold of 5 ounces for smartphone owners.
My take: This explains partly the success of the iPhone 4. Apple’s handset is a particularly thin and light smartphone that has wide appeal to normal mobile customers, not just savvy users. J.D. Power data picks out the iPhone as the highest rated phone for satisfaction.
5. Nielsen: 40 Percent of U.S. Mobile Users Own Smartphones; 40 Percent are Android
Apple and Android are neck and neck in appeal for those adults that intend to buy a smartphone in the next year: Both appeal to 30% of prospective buyers. But among an “Innovators” group of early adopters 40% intend to buy an Android smartphone compared with 32% for iOS. My take: This data demonstrates that the iPhone has broader appeal across mainstream users than Android.
iPhone 4S Is a Worldphone That’s Not, as Apple Positions to Counter Android
Apple’s product announcements today are a tale of two iPhones: the iPhone 4States and the Immortal 3GS.
Today at Apple’s annual event, new CEO Tim Cook unveiled evolved iPods, a new dual core iPhone 4S, and the voice-controlled virtual assistant based on Apple’s acquisition of Siri. He also recapped on iOS5 and iCloud which were announced back in June. Although Apple sell two thirds of their iPhones outside the US, I fear that the most innovative new parts of the iPhone 4S product design will appeal most to a US audience. Apple will still do well globally, but it could do even better with some tweaked product thinking.
Much more significantly, Apple now is moving to a three iPhone model portfolio: Apple will continue to sell both last years’ iPhone 4 and the previous years’ iPhone 3GS at cheaper price points. This will dramatically boost Apple’s phone sales volumes and enable Apple to compete head on with more Android smartphones.
The Immortal iPhone 3GS
The decision to keep on the 3GS as well as the old iPhone 4 is a massive move for Apple. It will extend the iPhone competitive threat to rivals into the mid tier of the mobile market. Apple’s competitors have often sidestepped the full force of the iPhone threat by positioning their models as cheaper phones. That strategy is now being squeezed and may become untenable in the US market.
Apple is positioning to counter Android with the new pricing and continued use of the iPhone 3GS.
Apple is motivated by great margins and not premium end user prices. If Apple can deliver keen prices to grab a market without sacrificing margins they will. The growth of the iPod product portfolio over the years as Apple’s economies of scales have enabled them to maintain margins yet lower prices demonstrates Apple’s aspirations: the new 2011 iPod Nano is the cheapest Nano Apple has ever launched. As the iPhone 3GS is so old, component prices will have fallen and Apple will have steadily improved manufacturing to minimize defects.
Those that are disappointed by the iPhone 4S’s identical appearance to its predecessor forget the success that its forerunner model enjoyed and in fact still enjoys. Back in 2009 there were similar comments to those being made today: Then, the new iPhone 3GS looked just the same as the older iPhone 3G. Those people were wrong then and so are they now:
Apple’s iCloud Enables A Post-PC World That Will Boost iPad & iPhone Sales
With the launch of the 2011 iPhone models, Apple will also launch iCloud, a new online services play that replaces MobileMe. This is a part of the iOS5 software that will be available for free to existing iOS devices and will ship as standard on new iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch’s.
This is a core part of Apple’s near term strategy to drive greater device sales — iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Mac — as Apple builds a post-PC world. Over the long haul iCloud will also help Apple’s content and services revenues but that won’t be its most important initial impact.
Apple still makes the vast bulk of its revenues from hardware sales despite having by far the most successful app store, music download store and various other services initiatives. Example: In the first three years after the launch of the Apple App Store Apple generated $1.1bn in revenue from iOS apps (1). But this figure is dwarfed by their iOS device revenues of over $100bn in the same period (2). Apple has great margins on those hardware revenues too.
Because of that hardware model, Apple has enormous incentives to create new product features to drive device sales, even if that means offering those new features or services for free. Apple can be disruptive with “free” offerings too. The “contagion of free” business models are not just the preserve of Google and Valley-based VC-funded startups.
This is the cloud the way it should be: automatic and effortless. iCloud is seamlessly integrated into your apps, so you can access your content on all your devices. And it’s free with iOS 5. — Apple marketing, October, 2011
Those devices sales give Apple a massive incentive to package its cloud services for free. In so doing, Apple undermines those that have cloud-based services as their core business. This includes Google. Although Google charges for few cloud services — the main exception being Google Apps for businesses — it still generates direct advertising revenues across all of its cloud services such as Gmail. So, if people choose to use Apple’s services instead of Google it still hurts Google’s bottom line.
iCloud supports Apple’s desire to sell more devices by helping two overlapping groups of consumers:
Kindle Fire Will Spontaneously Combust Traditional Media Business Models
I speculated ahead of Amazon’s launch that the Kindle tablet should be called the Kindle 451, from the Bradbury book where the temperature of 451F is that which causes book paper to spontaneously ignite. I was wrong. Kindle Fire is the better name as the Fire will burn so varied a selection of physical media that no single named temperature could describe its impact.
This is the first true media tablet, as I predicted it would be. With the Kindle Fire, Amazon is making a play for movies, TV, music, magazines, apps, games as well as books.
The Kindle Fire is the first tablet that has its whole design optimized for content consumption. There’s no extraneous features. No camera. No aspirations to replace a notebook PC.
While Apple, Google and Microsoft aim to build tablets and smartphones that drive a post-PC world, Amazon is taking ownership of digital media. And, as digital media will become all media, by implication Amazon is now becoming the leading player in media as a whole. It’s impossible to assess the prospects for the Kindle devices without also assessing the potential for the total digital media market.
Yet despite the Kindle Fire’s impressive hardware the price is extremely aggressive at just $199, a fraction of the price of Apple’s iPad. Until the component breakdowns have been completed we can’t be sure… and I’m writing this minutes after the end of the launch event… But I strongly suspect that Amazon has only achieved that price due to its expectation of strong sales for Amazon’s content services, ie an effective content subsidy again as I predicted would happen.
