[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

According to this article, all of Apple's wealth and revenue comes from the iPhone; over 70%.

The article gets it somewhat wrong. As of fourth quarter 2015, the iPhone's contribution was more like 64%. (See http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q4fy15datasum.pdf for the quarterly numbers, and http://investor.apple.com/common/dow..._As-filed_.pdf for the 2015 10K filing.) Note that the iPad made a greater contribution in prior years.

This means that Apple is now a phone company with some computing stuff on the side. One big mistake, and people could switch away from the iPhone. It's much, much easier to switch phones than to switch computers/operating systems.

Won't happen. Apple has tried as hard as it can to build brand loyalty, and succeeded. It will take a lot more than one mistake to get folks to switch.

Phones are not technology, they are fashion statements. The motive for all too many phone buyers is "My phone is cooler than yours!" It's why I wasn't expecting much from Microsoft's Windows Phone efforts, even though it's technically decent. iPhones are cool. Android phones are cool. Windows Phone isn't cool. The corporate executive with a company provided phone might have no problem with a Windows Phone device, because his IT folks will find it easier to have everything used running a variant of the same OS - Servers, desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones. His teenage daughter likely wouldn't touch a Windows Phone device with a stick. (And his teenage daughter is far more representative of the overall market than he is.)

Apple still defines cool for a major part of the market.

You can see how fast everything went downhill for Nokia and Blackberry. Nokia is very big outside the phone world (in networking and industrial applications and such), but Apple isn't, AFAICT. If the iPhone fails, Apple fails.

Nokia had been showing signs of problems for a while.

The problem is that the smartphone market resembles the movies - you are as good as your last hit picture, and Nokia hadn't had a hit for a while. Nokia's market share was concentrated in lower end devices at commodity prices where making any money was a challenge. Nokia's Symbian OS had turned into a development black hole, and issuing hot new higher priced products wasn't happening.

You can argue that Nokia really should have adopted Android instead of Windows Phone, but that would leave the challenge of differentiating Nokia's offerings from everyone else's Android efforts.

If Windows 10 fails, Microsoft will possibly fail as well.

It won't.

First, MS has its fingers in an assortment of pies. See CRussell's comment.

Second, people are adopting Win10. (I have it on two laptops here, and at some point the desktop will get it too. That's on hold because the desktop dual boots Linux, and I need to be certain of what happens when you do a Win10 upgrade in that case.)

MS faces an interesting challenge with Windows. Historically, most folks did not upgrade in place. They got a new version of Windows when they got a new machine that had a new version pre-installed. Hardware has gotten progressively faster, more powerful, and cheaper. There is less need to get a new machine, because the one you have probably does everything you need it to do. What will make you migrate to a new version of Windows?

MS's response was to make Win10 a free upgrade, and to remove as much friction from the process as possible. Windows is starting to look more like Linux in the way upgrades are handled. Another major change is that MS has decided the Enterprise customer is their core market. The pay attention to the CIO who signs off on a site license and support contract for multiple thousands of machines, and a lot of what people are objecting to ("Win10 phones home, and I can't tell it not to!") is in aid of that. The stuff Win10 phones home is intended to make it easier to support it and figure out what's wrong when there's a problem.

We'll see how it all works out, because the unanswered question is what MS will charge for down the road. Win10 is free, and it's been announced it will be the last version of Windows. I expect future upgrades to be far more modular, adding features to what Win10 already has with the core remaining pretty much the same, and the issue will be what additions people will be willing to pay for.

Then we have only Google and it will turn into Skynet.

<snicker> There's always Bing...
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Dennis