Quote:
Originally Posted by WillysJeepMan
You see Palm's story as a case study about blindly pursuing marketshare, I see it as a cautionary tale about resting on marketshare. By that I'm referring to the hubris that comes with market dominance.
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That's not quite as I remember it; what I remember are the repeated comments of the Palm execs insisting they would *not* yield any market share to Microsoft and they would always be way cheaper.
And they kept on doing it after PocketPC was eating their lunch and dinner with the mutimedia features and color displays. They kept on sending out B&W $199 organizers to do battle with $499 Pocket commputers and braging about their marketshare even as their losses piled up. "We're still the leaders!"
(shrug)
I also remember a comment from Bill Gates about Microsoft understanding their 90%-plus DOS marketshare was something of an oddity and that they didn't seek that kind of domination everywhere, that they just wanted to do as well as they could in a given market segment. If that meant 90% fine and dandy--it it meant 30%, so be it, too. Implied in that being that as long as they remained relevant to the market and made a profit they would fight but they wouldn't be wasting time and effort just to make a statement.
In well-run businesses, pragmatism trumps "High-minded principle".
With the iPhone I can more easily see an iWatch than an iPhone mini and not just because the iPhone4 *is* effectively a mini already. It's just that if we look at the Pod-line, the models aren't just different-sized versions of the same product; the have differet features and usage models.
The original iPod was "all your music in the palm of your hand" while the Shuffle is "load up a playlist for a workout".
Similarly the iPad is more of a in-house media consumption device than it is a giant iPhone. Even the iPad Mini profiles differently (more as an eReader than a media device).
So anybody that wants to make a case for a 3in iPhone first needs to identify a rationale other than "cheaper". Especially since Apple is already doing cheaper iPhones.