What RIMM doesn't say (and, as far as I can tell, no one else has noted) is that Apple has surpassed them in total smartphone revenues. This quarter RIMM reported sales of $4.1 billion in revenue for their whole company. Apple surpassed them, selling $4.6 billion worth of iPhones in Q4 2009 and, more recently, $5.6 billion in Q1 2010. Remember, the iPhone didn't exist until mid 2007.i Phone sales have gone from zero to $5.6 billion in about 900 days. It's very hard to compete against that explosive growth.
The product is getting in depth coverage from CNBC, Fox News, The NY Times, The LA Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Dave Letterman Show, The Jimmy Fallon Show, and practically every local news station and newspaper around the world. Not to mention prime time product placement in ABC’s Modern Family as well as a cameo in the most memorable Jay-Z moment at the 2010 Oscar’s.
And Apple has only spent to run one ad (which itself went viral on YouTube).
(credit: Jason Schwarz newsletter (subscription only))
Apple’s official carrier in South Korea, KT, revealed yesterday that iPhone has now surpassed the half-million (500,000) sales mark. This makes South Korea, a nation with 47 million total mobile subscribers, number 8 globally in first year iPhone sales.
There have been several chauvinistic campaigns in Korea that attempted to undermine iPhone’s success. Yet, ironically, these well-funded initiatives may have backfired
yet when I eventually got my hands on one, I discovered that one doesn't relate to it as a "tool"; the experience is closer to one's relationship with a person or an animal.
Goldman Sachs: “Evidence that the structural competitive issues are starting to weigh on its growth prospects. We estimate that RIM’s U.S. business declined 15% [quarter-on-quarter]—the second q-o-q decline in a row, and the first [year-over-year] decline. While RIM attributed that to an inventory reduction at a North America customer, we think the magnitude of the decline points more to lower demand at Verizon as a result of its endorsement of Android; our checks showed a dramatic reduction in the number of RIM [models] at Verizon last quarter and better sales for Motorola’s DROID than for RIM at many Verizon stores.”
The opportunity here is not to do web search better than Google, but to find a way to index the information that lives on the iPhone ecosystem. With potential for millions of apps and hundreds of millions of iPhones generating usage patterns a separate mountain of information is emerging independent of the current cloud. The mobile cloud has different hooks and different relevance measures.
Mobile search will be as much about new algorithms as about getting a new way to spider the data.
It seems Apple is better positioned to leverage this emerging space than Google.
I think the iPad is the most important launch in Apples history -- bigger than the Mac, iPod or iPhone. More than that, I think its the most important cultural phenomenon of this generation. Its bigger than technology.
"Apple has blown through the barriers with the iPhone, and the same thing is going to happen with the iPad," said Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer for Salesforce.com. "This will be huge for business, and a major new category that will be a catalyst for many different aspects of the industry."
"We believe that user experience complexity will grow and weigh in favor of those companies that can control and deliver superior integration through vertical integration of software and hardware,"
I've been banging on about this for some time. The analyst continues:
"We expect this unstable period to last for another 2-3 years before expected user experience stabilizes and a more horizontal industry emerges," he wrote.
In this type of market, Hall says, Google's Android has a greater advantage in a horizontal market than a vertical one.
"We would caution investors against prematurely declaring Android as the winner as we expect the mobile computer OS platform market to be hotly contested over the next 2-3 years," Hall wrote.
I would argue it will take even longer than 3 years for horizontal (or, as I call it, modular) architectures to become competitive.
The evolution of user interfaces is now so rapid that modes of interaction become obsolete before value chains have time to evolve.
The iPod continues unchallenged long after it over-served because standalone music players are no longer an attractive market to challengers, especially in light of the continued integration with a music service (iTunes).
Citing an unnamed executive familiar with the plans, MediaPost claims that Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has been touting the upcoming service, rumored to launch April 7th, as "revolutionary" and "our next big thing" amongst his inner circle. No further details were reported.
I think it’s a certainty that Apple will introduce an ad serving platform for the iPhone (and any tablet) in 2010. This will amount to a checkbox that developers will check when submitting their app to the store.
