Last quarter the iPad had unit growth of 166% with revenue growth of 146%. The iPad is selling more than twice the (also rapidly growing) Mac. The two product lines are shown below:
A big reason the Mac is still growing is that it now consists of 74% portables and the MacBook Air and Pro products are still largely unmatched and have a near monopoly in their target price.
The Mac's average selling price has remained remarkably steady for three years.
But more importantly the iPad and the Mac both outgrew the PC market. Taken as OS X vs. Windows, the growth rates were 27.7% vs. 2.5%. If iOS is included along OS X, Apple grew its "computer" shipments at a rate of 99%.
The following chart illustrates the growth rates for Windows, Mac and Apple as a combined OS X/iOS.
The Windows platform still ran on 82% of PCs sold in the quarter with iOS taking second with 10.5%, OS X third with 4.7% and Android at about 3%.
Even though Mac OS X grew faster than the overall PC market for 20+ quarters, its market share is still below 5%--lower than what the iPhone has been able to obtain in the far larger mobile phone market.
That share has grown from 3.2% in the same quarter of 2008 but it's still a very slowly changing landscape.
However, if we include the iPad, Apple begins to not only grow very rapidly, it moves up sharply in terms of ranking among PC vendors.
Last quarter's 16 million OS X and iOS tablets brought it into second place behind the 16.6 million PCs that HP sold. That was enough to give Apple 15% share vs. 15.7% for HP. Over the last three years Apple has gained nearly 12 points of percentage of share.
The other vendors mostly lost share but the most affected were the smaller OEMs. HP lost 2.6 points, Acer 3.9 and Dell 3.4. However "Other" lost 10.5 points. Lenovo is the only major vendor to gain share (+4.48 points).
What's interesting about this pattern is that whereas in the phone business "others" is a rapidly growing group of companies, in PCs the smaller vendors seem to be suffering. They still make up about 30% of the market but that's down from about 40% three years ago.
In contrast, "Other" went from 15% to 24% of the phone market in the same time frame. Part of the explanation is that the entry of the iPad took the wind out of the "low end" netbooks and other cheap PCs. Consumers migrated low-end usage to a product re-built around those jobs.
In the mobile phone market, the disruption is in the opposite direction: communication is moving rapidly up-market from real-time voice to latent messaging and from storage consumption to broadband consumption. The companies being rewarded today in the phone business are those who are leading the charge to new markets.
In other words, on the PC, we are witnessing low-end disruption. On the mobile phone we are witnessing new market disruption. The irony is that the low end PC and the high-end mobile are very nearly the same thing but the industries, channels and incumbent business models are very different.
Last quarter I was wrong because I thought Apple would throttle production of the iPhone 4 in the fourth quarter post-launch. "The reason growth would moderate was that Apple slowed production of the old model in order to switch out to the new model--we saw the same thing happen with the slowdown in iPad 1 and transition to iPad 2."
As a result I seriously under-estimated iPhone volumes in the second quarter (FQ3). That failure led me to question whether the theory I was using in forecasting was still valid. When it came time for a new estimate I hesitated.
I had to choose whether to apply the old seasonality theory or to assume that the game had changed and that the product would now grow organically.
The first assumption would put the iPhone growth at 100%+ while the second would place it in the 60% to 80% range. I decided to dial in a figure somewhere in between at 90% but I’m not very confident in this
The result was an over-estimation by almost the same error as that of the previous quarter. Most of the other product lines were accurately predicted, but again, as a always, the whole forecast rides on the iPhone.
So where does that leave the theory?
I now believe that the iPhone behaves far more consistent with the original theory. Namely that...
Overall production capacity is increasing at approximately 100%/yr.
There is significant seasonality due to production ramps as the product is updated on a yearly cycle. These cycles are tuned to reach maximum throughput during the US holiday period. I discussed this theory here.
Demand is practically unlimited and is throttled by both production schedule and distribution agreements
The first point is not controversial. The iPhone continues to grow at triple digits rates. The second quarter's 142% growth and the first quarter's 113% growth more than makes up for the 21% of the third. Fourth quarter promises to be exceptionally strong with management clearly guiding for a blockbuster.
The point of contention was number 2. If we look at the following chart, we can observe that it still holds:
Each new iPhone launch was preceded by a quarter where units went down sequentially. The same has happened with the iPad for the one tradition we've had so far.
Regarding the third point, Balance sheet analysis shows that investment in manufacturing process equipment installation slowed in the March quarter. That was not matched by a decline in the June quarter sell-out however it does correspond with a slowing in the September quarter. Using the PP&E line is something I'm still exploring but it does seem that there is support for the theory.
Mea Culpa
I made an error in abandoning my theory. I thought I had discovered an anomaly that made it invalid. I was wrong. I read too much into the late in cycle boom. I bought into the notion that the product was in a new pattern of behavior--due to expanded channel or broader portfolio. This was a mistake.
Footnote
There was one other bit of data that was offered to us which we ignored. At the 4S launch Tim Cook gave us a warning. He announced that 250 million iOS units had "just been shipped". After the announcement it turns out that the total was around 254 million. This came up in comments on this blog. I noted that if the number is correct I should shave 13 million off my iPhone number. I even went into my model and adjusted it to see the effect. I did not "correct" my estimate as I felt that this new data could be disguised and not meant to signal to us. This was another error.
At the Open Source Business Conference in March 2004 Clayton Christensen gave a presentation. It's available as an audio file for download here: Clayton Christensen | Capturing the Upside. I strongly recommend listening to the whole thing because it's the quintessential Disruption lecture.
It has relevance in many areas of analysis, but when I was trying to think of a way to characterize the potential for Siri I recalled one particular passage that I saw as almost clairvoyant. Seven and a half years ago, Clay said:
... the next time you go to a computer superstore, go to the voice recognition software shelf and pick up a box there that’s called the IBM ViaVoice. Now don’t buy it, but just look at it! They have a picture of the customer on the box, and it’s an administrative assistant who is sitting in front of her computer wearing a headset speaking rather than word processing.
You think about the value proposition that IBM has to be making to this woman. She types 90 words a minute. She is 99% accurate. If she needs to capitalize something, she just instinctively presses shift and cruises through. And IBM has to say, “No, don’t do that anymore. I want you to put this headset on and teach yourself to speak in a slow and distinct and consistent manner in complete sentences. If you must capitalize, you must pause, speak the command “capitalize,” pause, speak the word you want to capitalize, pause, speak the command “uncapitalize,” pause, please be patient, we are 70% accurate, this will get better we promise.”
This is not an attractive proposition to this customer. And IBM has -- I’ve not worked with them at all, but as I understand it -- they’ve spent maybe $700 million trying to make voice recognition technology good enough that it can be used in that market. This is a very difficult technical hurdle to surmount. Meanwhile, while they are investing that aggressively, Lego comes up with these robots that recognize “stop,” “go,” “left,” “right,” and the kids are thrilled with the four word vocabulary, and then "press -- or -- say -- one" kinds of applications take root, and now directory assistants ask you to say the city and state and so on, and much simpler, and an interesting market is emerging.
I bet maybe the next place it takes route is in chatrooms because the kids don’t spellcheck or capitalize anyway, and they would rather speak than type. And maybe then the next application would be, when you see these stubby fingered executives with their BlackBerrys trying to peck out emails, and their fingers are four times the diameter of the keys, they’re only 70% accurate. If somebody gave them a voice recognition algorithm that really didn't have to be very good so that they could speak their wireless email rather than peck it out, I bet they’d be thrilled with the crummy product. And ultimately, as it takes route in these new applications, it may get good enough that we can do word processing with it, but it’ll be a long time.
The thing that strikes me about Siri is how "crummy" it is. It's trying to be an intelligent assistant but it's not nearly good enough. Many have called it "toy like". It was so uninteresting that there was minimal coverage of it after the keynote launch. One can almost forgive the cynics. It was "yet another feature".
However, it does seem to be good in a very limited set of tasks. It is something you can hire for some minor jobs that you'd rather not do. Basic calendar booking, context aware search and a few delightful surprises. But it's not trying to be much more. It's not trying to be a typist. It's not trying to be a companion. It's not trying to be smarter than you and make you redundant. It's only trying to help lubricate your life. This is what makes it so exciting.
Like the example of the toy robot that delights the child, Siri delights with simple competence. It's not profound but as Clay points out in his talk, it's a necessary first step. What must follow are many more steps. Siri must get better. And because it will have at least 200 million users, I'm betting it will. So over time it will take on more tasks and will eventually help us in ways that we cannot yet conceive possible today. This is just like the introduction of the capacitive touch screen. Popularizing the touch screen has led to experiences with phones and tablets which we did not think possible four years ago.
But it takes time. Like any truly useful breakthrough, it takes a long time to mature. And also like any disruption, the potential of Siri is rooted in four principles:
Humble early goals which it accomplishes well
A large population of enthusiastic adopters who give it sustenance
Plenty of headroom in improvement giving it areas to grow into with positive feedback
A patient sponsor who makes a stable living
There's no magic to it. In fact it's banal. These are only the principles that every parent uses to raise a child.
In the last two posts (How much does an Apple store cost?, The down payment on iCloud) I discussed two line items in the PP&E asset class on Apple's Balance Sheet. In isolation, the data is interesting as it gives us an idea of the cost structure of stores and facilities being developed to sustain its current business model. In aggregate, it provides insight into Apple's strategic intent.
To complete the picture, I will look at the third asset: "Machinery, equipment and internal use software." It's the yellow line in the chart below:
It's plain to see at first glance that it's the most significant asset. What does it represent and what conclusions can we draw about Apple's strategy?
Before I begin, I should make clear what this asset represents and what it does not represent. These expenditures cover equipment used in production. They do not include components used in the production nor loans to suppliers for purchasing equipment. These are fixed assets that can be depreciated on a schedule and have specific tax treatment as a result. These are, in plain language, instruments used for producing things to be sold. They are things Apple owns.[1]
Using the same method as in the other asset analyses I took a measure of the sequential change in that asset over the time period and tried to see if there is a correlation between that spending and some other measure of output from the company.
Here is the sequential change chart since the end of 2005:
I noted that the pattern seems to relate closely with the increase in shipments of iPhones. More specifically, iOS devices. To test this I overlaid the overall volumes (with estimates of product types) of iOS shipments. This is a modified version of the chart published here.
There is a broad similarity. But again, as in the other analyses, the spending on assets typically predates the "output" from that asset. As we saw in land and buildings, the operational start of a facility may happen many quarters after the purchase is made. Similarly, stores open some time after the spending on fitting them out.
So it is with Machinery and Equipment. If we time-shift the output one quarter to account for spending before production we have a better fit (note the change in the title with "Q-1" indicating that the dates for the iOS shipments are offset by 1 quarter to the left).
We can even take the analysis further by breaking the spending and output into Phases corresponding to specific product cycles and introductions.
Phase 1: The original iPhone
Spending on M&E prior to the iPhone launch began two quarters in advance of sales. The following chart reflects this delay. Note that the M&E payments are marked with quarters ending six months earlier than the shipment schedule. Note also the scale (red denoting the M&E spending and black the units shipped). I also separated the two product types (iPod touch are my estimates, iPhone numbers are published by Apple).
This Phase corresponds to the first "bump" in the expenditure chart but offers more detail. There is an evident relationship between the "input" expense and the "output" of units shipped.
The cost of Phase I was $408 million.
Phase II: The iPhone 3G series
Phase II covers spending from the quarter ending March '08 to December '09 and production from September '08 to March '10.
For this Phase the time shift is only one quarter but there is a quarter's worth of spending that is initiated prior to any shipments. I chose to demarcate this Phase to cover production for both the 3G and 3GS as they probably shared a lot of common equipment. Some spending on new production lines however still had to happen as volumes increased during 3GS production.
Note the scale change from the first Phase. Whereas the maximum in Phase I spending was around $150 million per quarter, the peak is nearly twice as much in the second Phase. The peak output is 5x higher.
The cost of Phase II was $1 billion.
[I had to guess whether the Sep 09 and Dec 09 M&E spending was for 3GS or whether it was to prepare for the ramps in the new products about to be launched in the third Phase.]
Phase III: The iPhone 4 and the iPad
Phase III begins with spending prior to the launch of the iPad 1 (March '10) to the last quarter (ending June 2011). Coupled to this is production starting in quarter ending June '10 and ending in the last quarter.
Note that due to the time offsetting on production, the output from the spending on the quarter just ended will not be known until Apple publishes their shipments for the June quarter (scheduled for October 18th).
The relationship between pre-dated spending and production one quarter later holds quite well. There is a "surplus" of spending in December 2010 but that could be seen as the ramp being prepared for the second iPad.
Phase III cost is $3.7 billion so far.
Note again the change in scale from the previous two Phases. Peak M&E expenditures are around $900 million per quarter while production peaks at around 35 million units. This is a tripling of spending coupled to about a doubling of output.
Observations
The data suggests spending on equipment is correlated with the volume of production of its iOS devices. However, Apple is understood to be a company that outsources its production and does not "own" its own factories. Claiming that it keeps equipment used in the production of iOS devices on its books is an extraordinary claim.
I make a further claim that the scope of spending itself is extraordinary.
The following chart shows the three asset classes discussed in the three latest posts relative to each other (quarterly change in asset value).
In How much does an Apple store cost? I noted that the spending on leasehold improvements of $2 billion over a few years is significant and sustaining and largely asymmetric to competitors. You can see that spending in the grey bars above.
In The down payment on iCloud I noted that spending on Land and Buildings is significant and sustaining to iOS but not on a scale many can match. Those costs are shown in the blue bars above.
If, as I claim here, the yellow bars show the spending on Machinery and Equipment used in the production of iOS devices, then the commitment Apple has made to controlling production is even higher. In December 2010, M&E expenses were 50% higher than the spending on the data center and the new Cupertino campus put together.
The M&E assets have cost a total of $6 billion. The Apple stores have cost $2.3 billion and land and buildings $2 billion. In other words, Apple's machinery and equipment is worth much more than all its buildings and stores put together.
Compared with what Apple spends on other fixed assets, M&E is spectacularly significant.
In the twelve months ended June, Apple will have spent $2.9 billion in M&E to manufacture 118 million iOS devices. To put that in perspective, Nokia, which manufacturers a large (if not majority) of the 340 million phones it sells, expects full year 2011 capital expenditures of $1.1 billion.
Correcting for amortization and depreciation and deducting some spending on Mac M&E, it's very likely that Apple spent twice as much as Nokia on the instruments of production for one third the number of devices.
Conclusions
It may be too early to draw conclusions from this analysis. The claims should be debated and the claims should be tested, but I can suggest some tentative strategic implications.
Last December I wrote that I thought Apple should use its capital to own the means of production for iOS. I reasoned that device supply was its biggest deficiency and that perhaps ownership would allow them to become better at it.
Indeed, Apple has used capital to ensure it has better control over the supply of components and to also perhaps ensure capacity of production of those components.
But this analysis shows that Apple has gone much further toward integrating its value chain. It suggests that a large part of the tooling in its supply chain is owned by Apple. It suggests that those tools are put out of reach of its competitors.
The implications could be profound but given the length of this post, I'll leave that discussion for another day.
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Notes:
Some of the capital expenditures were also allocated to servers or "information systems hardware, software and enhancements." From the Annual Report 2010: Capital Assets. The Company anticipates utilizing approximately $4.0 billion for capital expenditures during 2011, including approximately $600 million for retail store facilities and approximately $3.4 billion for product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements.
In an Harvard Business Review post Rob Wheeler makes the case for the Kindle Fire as a disruptive innovation. I believe that it is but crucially I disagree that the Kindle Fire is a low end disruption.
My assessment of the Kindle Fire is based on the two attributes which Amazon highlights as the key selling points which offer a basis of differentiation and potential for asymmetric competition: a low price and a new browsing model. I believe that these two attributes result in two opportunities: one for low end disruption and another of new market disruption. I reject the first and tentatively support the second.[1]
The price
It's immediately obvious that the price point of the Kindle Fire is well below alternatives. That forms the basis of disruptive potential, but before we jump to analyzing the disruption hypothesis we should determine whether and to what extent Amazon profits from the device directly. Profitability gives us a clue to where Amazon will apply resources and thus establish its trajectory of improvement.
We know the margin on the Fire is low because we can calculate the bill of materials for 7" tablets. Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray estimates that Amazon "loses" $50 for each unit sold. We also know that the design Amazon used is essentially very similar to the RIM PlayBook and was sourced from the same ODM. RIM priced the product at $499 but has struggled to find buyers and is reluctantly dropping the price. We also can estimate that Apple with a product having more than twice the screen size is keeping modest (~30%) gross margins for at a price point approximately double that of the Fire. It does seem that Amazon does not have much or any margin to dip into.[2]
So the Fire can be classified as a low price product. Does that make it a low end disruption?
Disruption requires asymmetry but it also requires the ability to go up a trajectory of improvement along the basis of performance that a majority of users demand. The first condition is met, but what of the second? In a combined system where one asset is used to leverage another--the subsidized being sacrificed to benefit the profitable--success is conditional on one element being "good enough" while the other "needing improvement". Investment follows accordingly.
But investment decisions have consequences. The subsidized device is starved of investment while the profitable service is nurtured. We see evidence of short cuts in investment in the off-the-shelf nature of Kindle products: from a second-hand (unsanctioned) OS to a second-hand (ex-RIM) hardware. Meanwhile, Amazon spends heavily on capex for the infrastructure that delivers the profitable content.
If the hardware is indeed commoditized and cannot be usefully improved, then this model works. If, on the other hand, the hardware and systems software can benefit from dramatic improvements in technology then the model fails. The very asymmetry of a service vs. a product turns into the latter having all the advantages and the former failing to gain traction.
I'll give three examples of this how service model creates limitations which lead to a failure to disrupt a product model.
The Game Consoles
The first is the game console business. In consoles, the vendors maintain long hardware product life-cycles to recover their hardware investment and subsidy by maximizing the number of games attached to each console. If you plot product cycles you realize that the bigger the subsidy, the longer the hardware lifecycle. The result is a very wide turning circle which prevents innovation in new dimensions.
Consider that the Playstation or the Xbox could have been a low end computing disruption. The original Xbox was in fact a PC. It was supposed to bring PC dynamism to the console business and create a cottage industry of new developers building games on commoditized hardware. However by the second generation the Xbox was a locked down, custom architecture, pure gaming machine. Gone was Intel, gone was the PC architecture and gone was any dream of cheap development.
This is entirely due to the economics of subsidized hardware. It compelled Microsoft, the world's greatest software company, built on the open and cheap PC architecture to make closed, expensive hardware. Sony followed in kind as did Nintendo. Each generation of consoles was a sustaining improvement on gaming and had no ambition beyond gaming[3]. The subsidy and the dependence on an integrated content value network led to a distinct lack of disruption and an insular industry which continues to seek out increasingly immersive experiences for increasingly demanding customers while itself being disrupted by casual, mobile gaming.
The Set-top boxes
The second example is the TV set-top box business. There again, the vendors maintain long hardware cycles in order to recover subsides. There too, the main value driver is the content and its distribution which stipulates the architecture, and through subsidy, defines its evolution. This offers the vendor no motivation to improve the user experience[4], secondary uses or the absorption of new streams of content (like those the internet can offer.)
Again, the set-top box could have been a budding disruptive opportunity for Microsoft. They invested billions in the 1990s to acquire placement of software on set-top boxes in an attempt to penetrate the living room. And again Microsoft was not alone. Since then Tivo, Google and Apple and many others tried to attach cheap hardware to video streams. They all failed to get on a disruptive trajectory. And again, the blame can be placed on the stifling effect of subsidies and dependencies on services or content which dictate where the value and hence the investments should go.
The Blackberry
The third example is the RIM Blackberry. Although RIM made most of its money on hardware and was by no means subsidizing it, the differentiation of their product was undoubtedly its service value. Both as a corporate device with BES and as a consumer device with BBS, customers "hired" the product as a service. By being committed to this model RIM management became blind to the hardware and client OS software innovations coming down the pike.
Through their own admission, they could not accept a touch screen because it would make the messaging experience too slow and it is messaging that sells Blackberries. They could not accept apps (and hence platform orchestration) as a differentiation because their customers did not hire Blackberries for "lifestyle apps". Merely being differentiated as a service leads to blindness and enough hesitation that you run off the disruptive rails.
People ascribe myopia or incredible absence of mind to RIM's management but the opposite is true. They were deeply committed and observant of the things which made the Blackberry successful. It just happened to be something that stopped being relevant.
The iPhone
I'll add one more "bonus" example on this. The iPhone is also a subsidized product and it seems very successful. How come it won? The answer is in details. As I mentioned, the other products ended up in poor life cycles or incorrect motivations. The iPhone differs in that the lifecycle of the product is much shorter (2 years ownership with 1 year for product updates). The shorter lifecycle works for the iPhone because it has a very high service revenue base to dip into to offset the subsidy. Something none of the content models above could count on.
Consider that each game console subsidy needs to paid off by a handful of game titles whose royalties to the console maker are modest. Or that the TV box needs to ride on top a service that also has thin margins from a stable or slightly shrinking user base. In contrast, the iPhone enables vast new consumption worth thousands of dollars to the operator. This is the famous ARPU uplift that smart phones enable. Users are doubling their telecom spending when they move to smartphones.
The margins for Kindle content are thin. Very thin. Apple runs its content business at break even though it transacts billions of items per month. The amount of content that needs to pass through the Kindle ecosystem (with lower prices than Apple charges) will need to be astronomical to make it profitable on the shortened cycle time the iPhone enjoys. Thus the Kindle is likely to languish in a leisurely update cycle with users encouraged to hang on to their devices for years. This is the case at least with the original e-Ink Kindles. How eagerly awaited are new generations? How many users stampede to update the hardware or even upgrade the software? How many users have owned every version of the Kindle?
Service Scale
Finally one last point about services. As Amazon asserts, they see Kindle as a service, which, I concede, is asymmetric to a product business. The problem is that services don't scale as well as products. Consider that none of the content streams that Amazon will depend on are available outside the US. The Kindle has not been a strong seller internationally. This is because book rights are limited to national boundaries as are movie rights and song rights. Apple has only this week finally completed the rollout of iTunes music to all of Europe! A process that took almost a decade. And they are still unable to sell music in most of Asia and forget about movies or TV shows.[5]
The reality is that there are no global service brands. Not in telecommunications (operators are, at best, regional), not in Media (TV, radio, publishing are a local businesses), not in Banking (not even in commercial banking) and not in Retail (even Wal-Mart was humbled trying to export its disruption). The internet has not broken down any of these boundaries and even Amazon has modest reach outside the US for any of their franchises. Services are local but products can be global.[6]
To wrap up, this discussion on the asymmetry of device-based services to product models leads me to conclude that the Fire will not have the opportunity to disrupt the iPad or tablets in general. Amazon sees the hardware and software of a device as a commodity and the content and its distribution as valuable. This assumes that the device is "good enough" and will not require deep re-architecting or that new input methods can be easily absorbed. In short, they see the tablet as at the end of its evolutionary path. Apple sees the exact opposite. The iPad is 18 months old, and as they say in the ads, they see it as only the beginning.
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Notes:
Due to length of discussion, in this post I will make the case against the low end disruptive potential and use a second post to make the case for it being a new market disruption.
Presumably, Amazon will also distribute only through Amazon.com and thus not incur channel mark-ups. This means that comparisons with other tablets should be at a price nearer to 70% of retail.
Gaming networks and video streaming are extensions but neither leveraged open architectures.
Apps are another story. Because it controls the medium, Apple can and does sell apps in every country where the iPhone or iPad or iPod touch is available.
Note also that because of distribution through Amazon.com, the Kindle cannot reach as many buyers as a tablet selling through the tens of thousands of points of purchase that operators and retail shops offer.
Decoding Steve Jobs: Select Commentary from HBR.org
by Norm Smallwood, Kate Sweetman, Dave Ulrich, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Horace Dediu, James Allworth, Max Wessel, Rob Wheeler, Bill Taylor
"The news of Steve Jobs's retirement from Apple may be losing steam but observations on his legacy - and Apple's leadership future - are only beginning. In recent years, leading thinkers have contributed their thoughts on the Jobs phenomenon on HBR.org. We've compiled a few of the best here, and we invite you to read them through the lens of business lessons to be learned.' We've selected six pieces: two from after Jobs's August 2011 announcement and four from before. We hope you will enjoy them, learn from them, and continue to turn to HBR.org for ideas and inspiration.
In the post on OS turning circles, I used the concept of a radius of turning as an analogy for agility. One problem with the analogy is that turning in circles implies a return to a starting point or at least a closing of the loop. The idea is that there is lifecycle repetition. However, in reality, this does not apply to the world of operating systems.
An OS, as a platform, usually has a finite life. It is born, grows and usually reaches a point where it is no longer supported. Sometimes, a new platform is born to take its place from the original owner but more often a replacement comes from a new challenger company.
So rather than circles, the analogy of OS lifetimes may be more accurate.
If we do think of platforms as finite, then the natural question is what causes an end? We need to look for patterns which may indicate when a platform is reaching end of life.
The difference in this analysis is that the measure of "age" of a platform I use is not time per se but versioning. The logic is that each major version is a meaningful and significant improvement in a platform which needs to be delineated, marketed and celebrated. It embodies the business logic as well as the engineering logic of the platform custodian.
Taking the data from the last post I added a few more platforms: Symbian[1], PalmOS and Blackberry OS[2] to seek out patterns. I also separated the desktop/portable OS's from Mobile OS's and plotted these version-demarcated lifespans.
One thing to observe is that the scales of the two charts are comparable. There are examples of short- and long-term version updates and the number of iterations (lifespan) can be similar. I noted also that there were several platforms which have reached end-of-life[3][4]. Those platforms have a big black dot at the end of the line.
That leads to another observation. The end of a platform seems to be indicated not by simple age (the shortest lived was six years and the longest lived was 16) nor by the number of versions (PalmOS lived for five while MacOS lived for nine). Instead the end of life is most clearly visible as a lengthening of the development cycle.
Note that each platform that ended was preceded by a spike into the vertical--a significant delay in the release of a version. The data is one thing, but it's anecdotally supported by observation. Industry observers note that delays in improving the product are symptoms of some fundamental architectural or marketing roadblock. In the case of Mac OS, Apple struggled to bring modernity to its "Classic" OS. It need memory management, more reliability and a better file system to support the move to networking and media hub use that defined the consumer expectations of a PC.
There was a change in the basis of competition, away from pure productivity and more toward entertainment that turned out to be more demanding in new ways. Apple had to move away from Mac OS and lost time with its internal Copland effort before punting with NextSTEP. Similar transitions are visible with Palm (from PalmOS to WebOS), Microsoft (from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone) and Nokia (from Symbian to MeeGo) and RIM (from Blackberry OS to QNX). In fact, survival of a transition is relatively rare and never without significant pain and loss of value or share.
This is also understandable through the lens of disruption theory. As a product reached the point of being good enough, "breakthroughs" are harder to come by. Engineers and marketers struggle to push the product into increasingly rarefied strata of performance. The old architecture does not fit the new demands but it's crammed into them anyway. This last big push is then followed by a stall and ultimate demise. Meanwhile, an entrant gains lift in the rich atmosphere of new bases of competition with an architecture that's built specifically for it. The process then repeats.
And so the charts relate the same story of sustaining improvements followed by inevitable last gasps that Clayton Christensen first illustrated[5] in The Innovator's Dilemma. A book that came out just as the first mobile platforms cataloged in these charts began their ascent.
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Notes:
Versions of Symbian do not match easily to integer values. I used the versions as recorded by pdadb.net. The sequence is as follows: EPOC Release 3: "1", Release 4: "2", Release 5: "3", Symbian OS 6.0: "4", OS 7.0: "5", OS 8.0: "6", OS 9.1: "7" (9.0 was deproductized), Symbian ^3: "8". Symbian ^4 has been cancelled. These original version numbers are noted on the chart.
The times recorded are for "general availability of product" which in the case of mobile OS's means the time when a device using that OS was released.
End of life is defined as the last version generally available. In some cases (e.g. PalmOS 6) newer versions are built but they may not be released into a working complete product.
Windows Mobile is treated differently here than in the previous post. I chose to declare it EOL after version 6 and consider Windows Phone as a separate OS. This is because the name change is indicative of a break with the past. As before, I defer decisions about continuity to the developers and/or marketers who choose the naming conventions.
I'm glad Windows 8 is named the way it is. With Windows 7 Microsoft went to a numbering system which is much more rational than the mixed naming of the past. The number 8 actually corresponds to the actual sequential number of major versions of Windows released to date.
Windows proper actually did not start with what was called "Windows 1.0". Windows actually started in April 1992 when Windows 3.1 was released. It was the first Windows which was an operating environment onto itself, apart from DOS. It was followed by Windows 95 (which we can call "2"), Windows 98 ("3"), Windows 2000 ("4"), Windows XP ("5"), Windows Vista ("6"), Windows 7 and now Windows 8.
Given this nomenclature and the dates of general availability of said versions, we can derive a measure of the frequency of upgrades. For example Windows "2" followed about 41 months after "1" and "3" took 34 months after "2". If we continue this for all the versions, and assume "8" will launch by October next year, we can plot the cycle times of new Windows versions.
To make the story more interesting I added the same data for other OS platforms. OS X, iOS and Android have version numbers which correspond to the sequential order in which they were released. I am assuming that the numbering system (1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc.) are meaningful and that major releases are given a new integer value.[1]
I also added Windows Mobile which suffered from the same confused numbering that Windows suffered until the current Windows Phone 7. To create a map to integer values I used the following: Pocket PC 2000 is "1", Pocket PC 2002 is "2", WinMo 2003 is "3", WinMo 2003 SE is "4", WinMo 5 is "5", WinMo 6 is "6" and Windows Phone 7 is "7". There is no clarity when and what Windows Phone 8 will be so that is left off the chart.
The chart above does give a clue that Windows is a bit slower (more months between releases) than alternatives. However, the point I want to convey is that this cycle time can be a strategic advantage. A faster upgrade cycle means more rapid adoption of improvements, not to mention more revenues. Rather than a line chart, the better way to visualize it is as a turning circle.
The analogy is from aerial combat where a plane that can "turn inside" an opponent can get into a firing position. The tightness of turning circles also means that a competitor can iterate more quickly and thus move up the trajectory of improvements necessary to remain competitive more rapidly. To that end, I re-plotted the data above with radial axes.
The chart clearly shows how among desktops, OS X has been tighter than Windows[3]. Furthermore, mobile OS's have been, typically, more agile than desktop OS's. The exception being Windows Mobile which had significant architectural and business model challenges. It will be interesting to watch the radius of Android. So far it seems to be tight, but as tablet functionality has been added, the speed of change has slowed slightly.
However, the big contrast is between mobile and desktop. Microsoft tries with Windows 8 to merge the two. But these are different ecosystems. Buyers, OEMs, users, all have different behavioral patterns (jobs-to-be-done) for mobile OS vs. desktop/portables. Will the cycle time for Windows 9 and Windows 10 tighten up? Can Microsoft operate its OS division at this new cycle time?
What is even more bad news is that the most important customers for Microsoft, enterprises, actually upgrade every other version. The Windows "radius" is nominally averaging about 35 months but large account adoption is closer to 60 months.
The contrast is then striking: Consumerized devices with over-the-air updates on a 12 month cycle are five times more agile than a traditional corporate Windows desktop. Another way to look at this is that for every change in a corporate desktop environment, the average user will change their device experience five times. Although Microsoft might find comfort in Enterprises' leisurely pace of change[2], those are the wrong customers to keep happy going forward.
The implications are left as an exercise to the reader, but I would argue that along with the asymmetry in business model around pricing that I highlighted in the last Critical Path podcast, Microsoft has a significant operational asymmetry with devices as a new class of computers.
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Notes:
The dates of general availability of various versions of operating systems.
Version Windows OS X Windows Mobile iOS Android 1 4/6/92 3/24/01 4/19/00 6/29/07 10/21/08 2 8/24/95 9/25/01 10/1/01 7/11/08 10/26/09 3 6/25/98 8/24/02 6/23/03 6/17/09 2/22/11 4 2/17/00 10/24/03 3/24/04 6/21/10 5 10/25/01 4/29/05 5/9/05 10/1/11 6 11/30/06 10/26/07 2/12/07 7 10/22/09 8/28/09 11/8/10 8 11/1/12 7/20/11
While at Nokia's Enterprise Solutions I was witness to this difference between the cycle time of devices and the pace of adoption of Enterprises. The fundamental disconnect was that the sales cycle for a "solution" was longer than the shelf life of a device upon which that solution was predicated. Needless to say, Nokia Enterprise Solutions did not last long. Nor do we see today any significant Enterprise-focused mobile device businesses (RIM itself moved to consumerize its products years ago.)
I added Mac OS data to the second chart to also illustrate that no company is immune from spinning out of control. Mac OS clearly went spun out after version 6 with increasing delays leading to its demise and replacement. You can also note that its replacement (OS X) was able to straighten-up and fly right. The lesson may be perhaps that ditching and starting over is a viable option.
The question of low end disruption should be a concern to any manager. It's one of the most important sources of growth and has led to a vast amount of wealth creation.
Apple was an early low end disruptor by selling personal computers at a fraction of mini-computer prices. Toyota also offered "cheap" cars as an entrant in the market. Pixar made blockbusters for a lot less than live action studios. Google offers good enough office software without a license. Finally Microsoft built its whole business on low-end business software at knock-down prices.[1]
All these entrants made fortunes often at the expense of entrenched incumbents. Disruption grows the pie but also transfers a lot of value away from existing competitors.
So it should not be surprising that new products like the iPad should be scrutinized for their vulnerability to low end disruption. Brian Caufield asks the question if Apple has any future with the iPad given the potential for $99 tablets.
The question is indeed why not introduce an ultra-cheap tablet, for example from Amazon, which makes up for the low price with an innovative business model like selling content or user behavior data. After all, game consoles are sold this way. This is the classic razor/razor-blade business model.
The answer to why not is actually not simply that the economics don't work. They might work some day even if they really don't today.
The answer to why not is that the iPad is not good enough.
Disruption (low-end or otherwise) happens when a product over-shoots the market. It makes sense to compete on a new basis, be it low price or convenience or customization, if the prevailing basis of competition has led the prevailing products to be more than good enough. If you look through all the examples of low-end disruption, you'll find that the incumbents were motivated to flee up-market and to continue to improve their products even though they exceeded the demands and expectations of mainstream buyers.
For the iPad to be vulnerable, it has to be way better than the mainstream users' needs. Which asks the question of what needs are being served. If it's book reading, it probably is more than good enough. But if it's replacing a laptop computer, certainly not. Being too feeble is the most common complaint about the iPad. Being a bloated over-functioned and overly complex solution looking for a problem is definitely not on buyer's list of concerns.
So on this basis, the iPad and other tablets pass vulnerability tests with flying colors. The product is woefully inadequate for mainstream computing.
The consequence is that people will yearn and beg for more functionality and will drop the last generation for the next without hesitation. This pattern of breathless upgrades is symptomatic of a product racing up a trajectory of improvements which are relevant to buyers.
So until buyers find the n+1 version of the iPad to be superfluous and over-specced, having too much battery life, too big a screen, too much storage and with more speed and bandwidth than needed, the iPad need not fear the low end.
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Notes:
Other classic low-end disruptors are: Wal-Mart, GE Capital, Toys 'r Us, Sun Microsystems, Dell, Hyundai, MySQL, Amazon, Visa, Embraer, E-trade, Macy's, Japan Steel, Circuit City, Home Depot, Yahoo Travel.
In a rare reflective moment Steve Jobs, after the launch of the iPad, mentioned Apple's DNA. He said:
"Technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that makes our hearts sing.
Nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices...that need to be even easier to use than a PC, that need to be even more intuitive than a PC; and where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC.
We think we are on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon but in the organization to build these kinds of products."
Steve Jobs' legacy in product development has been clearly established and celebrated. What remains now is to determine his legacy in company development. If indeed Apple has the "right architecture in the organization" to serially build disruptive products. The collection of evidence begins today.
If Apple has indeed become Jobsian then it will have been a grand achievement. John Gruber is already convinced. He points out
Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.
If indeed he has built Apple sufficiently well to last then he has built an admirable process and not just a product. But this would not be a unique achievement. There have been other companies which preserved their founders' cultural imprints, at least for significant periods beyond their departure. Consider that Disney, Ford and even HP and IBM remained successful for many years after the departure of their founders operating much the same way. They were infused with an indelible culture and preserved it for some time.
But a leader should aspire to do more. A leader should claim to have left a legacy not just on their company but on all companies.
Is it not more worthy to have changed civilization than the fortunes of a few?
I believe that Steve Jobs has actually sought just that. He put it as "making a ding in the universe." This can be interpreted as developing products that "change everything". But if the thing that Steve Jobs should be most proud of is the creation of Apple Inc. then how exactly could an Apple Inc. benefit the world?
This is where Jobs' quote above strikes me as valuable. The lesson the world should take from Apple is that a company needs to become multi-dimensional. It needs to mix the core business with the disruptive innovation. It needs to combine the intellectual with the artistic. It needs to maintain within it the rational and the lunatic.
Apple's violent success should serve as a powerful beacon that others should follow. Rather than copying its products other companies should copy Apple's processes--its way of thinking. They should copy how Apple harbors the creative process and the technology processes under the same roof.
If they do heed this call then we should look forward to the the post-Jobs era as that time when large companies gained the ability to intertwine multiple core competencies. A time when humanism balanced corporatism. A time when we came to reconcile the rational and spiritual.
