Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
On the other hand, Apple cannot afford to lose market share either. Soon the iPhone is going to be a niche product. If you cannot compete with features, you are going to have to compete with price.
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Apple can easily afford to lose market share...
...as long as they're racking up a cool billion a month in net profit.
There are plenty of successful, influential, and *profitable* companies who live off niche products. There are also a lot of irrelevant money-losing niche vendors. "Niche product" is a not an insult the way "poorly run company" is.
Check the history of Palm Computing (if you're not familiar with it) for a case study of how the blind pursuit of market share can destroy a company.
Short version: they focused on high volume/low margin connected organizers while MS focused on corporate Pocket computers and cherry-picked the best (read:affluent) customers. At one point, Palm had 70% market share and zero profits while PocketPC had 30% unit share and 100% of the profits.