Apple's War on Android

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by ScotiaBurrell

Why apple not die before ipod became a hit if marketshare most important number?

It was about to die, but it was rescued by Microsoft.

[ScotiaBurrell]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

It was about to die, but it was rescued by Microsoft.

Myth. good products only thing save any company.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by kartu

Cisco routers? Microsoft Office?


High margin means somebody is ripped of. Some (Confucius among them) believe(d) this is bad for society.

MS Office has *nothing* like 100% market share.
For one, IBM still sells Lotus Symphony, Corel still sells WordPerfect, Softmaker has *their* suite and then there's OpenOffice and LibreOffice for the freeware fans.

Cisco?
Last I looked (which isn't often--they're not *that* important in the consumer space) their competition was squeezing them just fine.
http://kellyherrell.wordpress.com/20...on-increasing/

High margins means somebody is *willing* to pay a premium price for *some* reason. No more, no less.

I'm not here to praise Apple--I'd rather bury them--but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking they aren't making a billion bucks a month net profit just because none of it comes from me.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by ScotiaBurrell

Myth. good products only thing save any company.

Fact:

In Jobs’ own words:

“We were 90 days from going bankrupt.”

[ScotiaBurrell]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

Fact:

in other words reorganization.

[ScotiaBurrell]

Originally Posted by kartu

Does 18% of the smartphone market share (worldwide, in US it's 25%) sound bad enough?

Not dying company. http://www.bgr.com/2012/04/02/iphone...g-gains-share/

Apple’s wildly popular iPhone 4S retained its position atop the smartphone ranks in the United States last month according to new data analyst data. Checks performed by Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley and his team found that Apple’s latest iPhone was the best-selling smartphone at Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint in March, continuing a trend that began when the device first launched last October. “Our March channel checks indicated stronger sell-through trends versus February levels with sales rebounding after a slow start to 2012,”

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kartu

Does 18% of the smartphone market share (worldwide, in US it's 25%) sound bad enough?

It's heading the same way on tablet front, with Apple losing market share a bit faster than anticipated.


Zune, cough? Bing, cough? Smartphones, cough? Oh, it has captured whopping couple of % of the market and turned excellent hardware manufacturer, Nokia, into a zombie? That's quite an achievement...

Oh, you've mentioned Internet Explorer. Note that it only won vs Netscape (which cost money) And note that it payed for this "victory" about 1 billion, to avoid going to court. Because the only way, Microsoft is successfull "competing" is when abusing one of its monopolistic powers. But there we go with IE:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_s...f_web_browsers



Not sure about comparable, but superior tablets, like Samsung Galaxy 10.1 (it's only after ipad3 is out, that people discover, that ipad2 color gamut sucked) or Asus Prime are normally 50$-ish cheaper than Apple's.

Your chart is incorrect. Firefox has always had a higher % of users then Chrome. Here is the proof. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

As you can see, there's not one month where Chrome has more people using it then Firefox.

[cjr72]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Your chart is incorrect. Firefox has always had a higher % of users then Chrome. Here is the proof. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

As you can see, there's not one month where Chrome has more people using it then Firefox.

The link you provided states at the bottom of the page that their numbers can't be taken as proof:

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. The average user tends to the browser that comes preinstalled with their computer, and do not seek out other browser alternatives.

These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser.

Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over many years, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends.

[wizwor]

wikipedia is the TRUTH! LOL.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

It was about to die, but it was rescued by Microsoft.

MS didn't "save" Apple, and the $150 million investment was a drop in the bucket compared to Apple's $1 billion loss the year MS bought the stock. The fact that MS agreed to continue producing Office for Mac was probably more important than the cash.

What saved Apple was that Jobs cut 70% of the Mac line (there used to be about a dozen different models; this also led to 3,000 workers being laid off) and focused on only producing 4 models. And that, one year after he came back, he introduced the iMac.

[SteveEisenberg]

If Apple was really waging a business war, they would sell their devices cheaper than Android. Instead, they are expending cash, that could have been used to crush competitors, to pay dividends and buy back stock.

I'm not a big fan of lawsuits, but, even metaphorically, they fall far short of war. As the OP article kind of indicates, settlement is a likely outcome.

Now, Amazon vs. bookstores -- there's a business war.

[VaporPunk]

Originally Posted by ScotiaBurrell

Eh. Marketshare overated. It is a sustainable profitble business. Just like selling mac computers. Marketshare overated/not tell whole story.Eh. lies.

Tell that to the app developers.

Originally Posted by ScotiaBurrell

Why apple not die before ipod became a hit if marketshare most important number?

Eh. lies.

Nobody said Apple would die.

[kartu]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

I'm not a big fan of lawsuits, but, even metaphorically, they fall far short of war. As the OP article kind of indicates, settlement is a likely outcome.

Apple has spent more than 100 million USD on sueing competitors.
They were silly enough to take on patent monsters like Nokia or Motorola. ("reality distortion field" of hypno-Steve worked I guess)

And when you check WHAT kind of patents they are using to sue anyone, it isn't even funny. What came out from Apple's R&D pretty please? Multitouch? Uhm, they bought it. (but ok) Intertial scrolling and gestures for zoom in/out. Yep. Anything else? Oh, they've "invented" rectangular tablets. Oh, they've re-invented magnetic lock, by taking 20+ year old patent by somebody else and adding "on mobile devices" to it. Nice.

Patent laws around the globe change from non-existent/don't-care in developing countries to poor/pray-to-god-that-judge-is-not-Johanna-Brueckner-Hofmann(DE)/idiotic(I won't name the country) With enough cash you can go frenzy suing for imaginary damages and even succeeding at it.

Originally Posted by fjtorres

MS Office has *nothing* like 100% market share.

Oh yeah. On about 1 billion of Win PCs out there, they "merely" have 750 million active users. But I got your point, both 18% and 75% is "nothing like 100%". `

But the point was, you CAN have dominant position in the market you've pioneered and we have examples of that.

Cisco?
Last I looked (which isn't often--they're not *that* important in the consumer space) their competition was squeezing them just fine.

Last I looked, Cisco still had 75%-ish market share.

Oh, and Intel is cloase to finish AMD.

Originally Posted by fjtorres

High margins means somebody is *willing* to pay a premium price for *some* reason. No more, no less.

That *some* reason is exactly what I'm talking about and it comes down to "oh, there is no real competition", situation where capitalism sucks badly, e.g.:
1) Company is in a monopolistic position
2) There is a cartel agreement between major players (e.g. roaming prices)

No, it's not a valid strategy, it is something that *must* but isn't yet eliminated by the government.

Originally Posted by wizwor

wikipedia is the TRUTH!

Oh, wikipedia is the lies, I'm sorry. No sources, just some silly text made up by anonymous guy passing by.

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

If Apple was really waging a business war, they would sell their devices cheaper than Android.

This would make sense only if it would lead to more sales, which is arguable.

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Instead, they are expending cash, that could have been used to crush competitors, to pay dividends and buy back stock.

Seriously? When was the last time they've payed dividends? This year? How much % does it return per share?

Company owns its customers good and hard with insane margins. With 18% of the market they have bigger income than remaining 82% combined. AND they don't know what to do with that amount of cash so they simply sit on a 100bn $. (spending 10 billion on buyback doesn't really change the picture)

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by kartu

High margin means somebody is ripped of. Some (Confucius among them) believe(d) this is bad for society.

Confucius was an economist?

I don't shop in Saks Fifth Avenue, or even in Macy's, and I don't buy buy Apple products. But their avoidance of loss leaders insures that the lower priced products I buy at, among other places, NewEgg and WalMart, will continue to be marketed.

I'm more concerned about predatory pricing a la Vanderbilt, Rockerfeller, and Bezos.

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by ScotiaBurrell

in other words reorganization.

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

MS didn't "save" Apple, and the $150 million investment was a drop in the bucket compared to Apple's $1 billion loss the year MS bought the stock. The fact that MS agreed to continue producing Office for Mac was probably more important than the cash.

What saved Apple was that Jobs cut 70% of the Mac line (there used to be about a dozen different models; this also led to 3,000 workers being laid off) and focused on only producing 4 models. And that, one year after he came back, he introduced the iMac.

Do you both think that the agreement with MS did nothing to do with Apple coming back from the brink of bankruptcy?