I don’t own a iPhone, but I do have iPod. I thinkk Apple makes fine products, but I did not want to switch to AT&T. AT&T is Apple’s achilles heel, AT&T is the reason Android is making inroads. It really has nothing to do with the iPhone itself, it is the exclusive agreement with AT&T.
Now, the attenae thing may or may not be overblown, but I would think fanboys can admit (even if they don’t admit they are fanboys), that Apple puts a big bullseye on their chest in a number of ways. Primarily by making good products that people want to buy. Secondly would be their overblown prouncements about their products, the most egregious case recently being their declaration that the iPad was some sort of miracle device. Third is Steve Jobs himself who seems smug, holier-than-thou in a lot of his attitude. Fourth, whcih is outside of Apple’s control to a large extent is the Applenista who are ready to strike when anything bad is said about Apple. So what happens is Apple’s problems are amplified by those who are put off by the company in general, and the defenders are also amplified and before you know it we have an antennae issue possibly bbeing “tHE END OF THE WORLD”.
For the billionth time: If they went with Verizon or Sprint, they would have had to make a CDMA phone which wouldn’t have worked anywhere but in the United States. Their resources are limited and they didn’t want to make two different phones at first. They wanted a worldwide product. They were limited to AT&T or TMobile in the US and AT&T was the better choice.
I am not saying it was the bad or wrong decision, it may be the best possible situtation. But it is stil the weak point and the reason others are making inroads.
Another reason I have read is that AT&T was willing to make changes to their systems to accomodate the iPhone, which is another reason that Apple went with AT&T. For example, when the original iPhone came out, it introduced a new feature where you could see a list of all the voicemails you had, and skip directly to listen to the third voicemail, leaving the first two unread, something that would not have been possible without changes on the carrier side.
They’d love to, they try to, and they are failing miserably. That’s why I disagree with your claim that they have a good foundation - they used to, but it is crumbling. The future of high margin products is clearly portable things like phones and tablets.The only success Microsoft has had in the consumer space is the Xbox, which is why the division is now reporting directly to Ballmer. Their tablet got canceled before introduction, the Kin was an embarrassment, (total sales seem to be less then iPhone sales in one day) and Zune is still alive but going nowhere. Apple is running rings around them in terms of innovation, and Google was able to get a good foothold in the phone market.
Microsoft will have the business space for a while, but more and more people are going to go to the web for word processing rather than pay a fortune for Office. Since Win7 seems to be a decent OS, it will be years before another upgrade cycle, like the case of XP.
Anyhow, if Apple misstepped, it was not anywhere close to how badly Microsoft misstepped.
Unfortunately, it’s only a matter of time before other manufacturers get into Microsoft’s markets. Google (via Android) is now a player in the operating system market; it could well be a prelude to their entry to the PC OS market.
That was one of the things that made me get my 3G iPhone on launch weekend (the other was GPS). It seems unbelievable now that in order to listen to a voice mail you had to listen to at least the beginning of every voice mail that came before it including the ones that you saved.
Maybe I am too focused on the past. I’ve been using Macs at home since 1987. At the time of the Apple II, Apple had a significant portion of the home market, but it has never broken in the the office world. Their portion of the home market dropped drastically when the Apple II went away. In the late 1990s I was pretty sure that my current Macintosh would be my last and my next computer would be a Windows machine. And this is back when the personal computer was Apple’s only business. Many people thought that Apple was a lost cause (as in Michael Dell’s famous comment in 1997). Even nowadays, when seeing an Apple laptop is not a cause for surprise any more, PCs are dominant in the home market. And when people send documents, it’s either PDF, Word or maybe Excel - rarely anything else.
I don’t know about you guys, but in the business world I inhabit, it’s 100% Microsoft for desktop computers, e-mail, and internal document sharing. I don’t see that changing any time soon. To bring that 100% down to 80% or 70% would be a huge challenge for any competitor, even Google.
I don’t have the iPhone 4G yet, but I love my 3G and I don’t have any trouble with ATT. As a matter of fact I get a signal in places my brother’s Verizon phone won’t. I’ll get a 4G eventually.
That would be a huge challenge if we’re assuming that the systems aren’t interoperable. Google’s approach appears to be to offer web-based alternatives to Windows programs, but I think they’d probably be better off just coding their OS to run Windows programs (whether by emulating a portion of Windows, or whatever).
The point is not that MSFT will give up market share in the business world, but that the business market is becoming an increasingly small part of the total market. 20 years ago you had a relatively powerful computer at work and, maybe, a cheaper and less powerful computer at home. Today you likely have several computers at home, more powerful than the one at work, and some phones and other stuff that do computing also. Hell, when I worked for Intel my home PC had a later OS than my work PC.
I haven’t seen any numbers, but I suspect the home and business refresh cycles are now pretty similar. Vista failed because businesses didn’t see the need to upgrade.
Bad move. They’d be subject to compatibility problems if there are hidden APIs, plus it is not like Windows with all the accretion of features and backwards compatibility issues is something you want to copy. The reason MSFT was so hot on forcing IE down our throats is that the browser is the new OS, and a very open one too, with open standards. A lot of people are going to live in their browsers - it will let you read mail, search, do social networking stuff, and also create documents. And you can move seamlessly from your PC to your tablet to your phone. What Microsoft most fears is the OS becoming irrelevant, which is going to happen not that long after we have pervasive WiFi.
They’ll never replace the OS completely - OS’s do lots of detailed hardware things browser writers don’t care about. It is just as when an increasing number of the functions that people want to do can be done in the browser.
Nothing new about this. 20 years ago someone who worked for me spend all his time at work in emacs. He could edit, compile, debug, and send mail in it.
I know that Google is trying to compet with Microsoft in the home computer operating system market (and probably the business operating system market also), but when I see how little inroad Linux has done, I don’t foresee Google making a big dent there either. Vista got a lot of bad press but Microsoft has overcome that with Windows 7. Businesses will be upgrading to that - they won’t be buying new office worker systems and putting Windows XP on it forever.
I’m not an insightful prognosticator - ten or twelve years ago, I never imagined that Apple would be where it is now. But I would be willing to bet money that a Microsoft operating system will still be on most home user’s desktops or laptops in 2020, and a vast majority of the computers found on the office worker’s desk.
Google Chrome is quite a different beast than both the Dell WebPC and Linux and the times are very different as well.
Cloud computing and storage is now very real; Google understands how to manage the clouds as well as anyone. Microsoft is paying catch-up at best.
Netbooks (of which the slate form factor like the iPad is one version of) are a sizable portion of the market (about 20% of laptop sales); Chrome is initially aimed to penetrate there. The concept of not needing (and paying for) as much power and storage on-hand because you are off-loading those tasks is sinking in from the bottom-up.
No, the Enterprise market is not going to give up on Microsoft overnight and Chrome isn’t ready to give those users everything they want yet either. But those two factors are setting the stage for when Google does have the package complete. Users will be increasingly used to the concept that their work is shared on-line and processed on-line and at some point some number cruncher will do the crunching and add it up as less cost and more reliability to not go with the next Microsoft upgrade and the new servers.