Mobile
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Why Doesn’t Apple Enable Sustainable Businesses on the App Store?
This series of posts is about enabling sustainable businesses on the App Store. In Part 1, I discuss why Paper and other productivity apps may not be doing as well as you might think. Part 2 explores why casual games, in contrast, are a sustainable business, but not a differentiator for platforms (I added a follow-up…
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Yahoo, Tumblr, and the Signal-to-ads Cycle
Tumblr is worth far more to Yahoo than $1.1 billion, and worth far less as a standalone company. That makes this acquisition a win-win; Yahoo is buying three important parts of the signal-to-ads cycle, and Tumblr’s investors are getting a nice exit. There are three ways to improve advertising revenue: Sell more ads Sell more effective…
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Paul Otellini’s Intel
From an extended feature in The Atlantic: Even Otellini betrayed a profound sense of disappointment over a decision he made about a then-unreleased product that became the iPhone. Shortly after winning Apple’s Mac business, he decided against doing what it took to be the chip in Apple’s paradigm-shifting product. “We ended up not winning it or…
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The Android Detour
Google is at its best when its product focus follows its business model; for too long Android was a detour.
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Change for Change’s Sake
iPhone OS was, but for copy-and-paste, a perfect OS (bear with me here – assume this is true). It handled every function the iPhone was expected to do in an incredibly elegant and polished way, and it’s not an accident that much of the core functionality has gone unchanged for six years. The tech press and…
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If Not for Android, Where Would Google Be?
John Gruber responded to yesterday’s piece about an alternate reality where Android didn’t exist and Apple gained 70% market share with piece called If Not for Android, Where Would the iPhone Be?: But with today’s piece, we have a first: one where I disagree with Thompson’s conclusions. I don’t think the iPhone’s market share or sales…
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Two Bears
There are two Apple bear cases; only one applies to Apple, though, and the other applies to Samsung.
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Why Do Carriers Subsidize the iPhone?
Horace Dediu at Asymco used the data I compiled1 in “The Case for the Low-Cost iPhone” to further elucidate why carriers tolerate the iPhone’s industry-leading subsidies. The presumption behind smartphone usage is that it leads to more browsing which leads to more network usage which in turn, leads to more network revenues and, finally, more network…
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Observations on the App Annie Index
App Annie posted their quarterly app report this week, and there were three big-picture trends that jumped out at me. 1. Google Play is getting over the monetization hump, and it’s likely due to in-app purchase From the report: Over the past quarter, Google Play has achieved higher growth rates than the iOS App Store for…
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Apple, Samsung, and the Parable of the Model-T
Steve Jobs was famously fond of the Henry Ford adage: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It’s true! New products – new categories – require vision and an unflinching focus on the job to be done (i.e. transport), not simply enhancing or extending solutions that already exist (i.e.…