Quote:
Originally Posted by ucfgrad93
Wanna bet?  |
+1
Apple betting the farm?
Let's be realistic, people!
Apple is now in the same class as Microsoft and very few other big companies as companies that can operate for *years* without a single cent of revenue and not even blink.
Look at how long Sony has endured in the face of floundering management, mediocre to laughably bad products, and billion-dollar losses year after year.
Edit: Apple isn't going away regardless of what kind of product the third iPad turns out to be.
As for market share; it is highly over-rated as a metric for corporate success as well as market domination. Let's not forget that Palm used to maintain an enormous market share lead over PocketPC right up to the point Palm finances collapsed. The name of the game is profits and not all customers are created equal. Considering that the tablet landscape includes dozens of vendors pushing generic supercheap Android tablets it would hardly be impossible for Apple to drop to well under 50% and still be the *only* tablet vendor of any relevance, just as IBM was still head and shoulders and ankles above all their competitors in the mid 80's during the peak of the PC-clone era.
The real question is whether or not any competitor other than Apple will make significant *profits* from the sale of tablets. (Keeping in mind that Amazon, B&N, and to a lesser extent Kobo, make the bulk of their profits from content instead of the hardware.)
The tablet environment that is shaping up--high-spec iPads and WinPads at the $500+ price point and content-assisted mid-range products at the low end--is going to put the squeeze on the profitability of the hardware-only vendors who are going to have a hard time matching either benchmark.
As young as the ebook business is, the webpad/tablet business is even younger. In PC terms it is barely 1980.
The real game hasn't even started.