You're Doing It Wrong
So, by now you have heard Steve Jobs himself jumped in to the fray during Apple’s financial conference call. MacWorld has the transcript. We will condense the report :
... I just couldn’t help dropping by for our first 20-billion-dollar quarter ...
We sold 14.1 million iPhones in the quarter, which represents a 91 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter
We’ve now passed RIM. And I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately, there is no solid data on how many Android phones are shipped each quarter.
In reality, we think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is, “What’s best for the customer – fragmented versus integrated?”
...we are confident that it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as “open.”
Second, I’d like to comment on the “avalanche” of tablets poised to enter the market in the coming months.
First, it appears to be just a handful of credible entrants, not exactly an avalanche.
Second, almost all of them use seven-inch screens, as compared to iPad’s near 10-inch screens. Let’s start there.
The seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone, and too small to compete with an iPad.
The iPad is clearly gonna affect notebook computers. And I think the iPad proves it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.
So the more time that passes, the more I am convinced that we’ve got a tiger by the tail here, and this is a new model of computing which, you know, we’ve already got tens of millions of people already trained on with the iPhone.
The moral of the story is that Apple just owns the portable computing market, and for anyone to catch Apple would require them to become... well, better than Apple and that just isn’t going to happen. Anyone paying attention would have been going to Business 101 to listen to Steve Jobs explain exactly what is going on. But then someone who wasn’t Steve Jobs asked this question :
Q: You are the tablet market right now… This is the second time you’ve come on to talk about competition, and I’m just wondering if much like Apple encroaching on RIM’s monopoly in enterprise, if you think Apple is gonna be able to sustain share growth for tablets amid some of those new competitive headwinds. Some of those players may try different things and strategies, like tethering and Flash, multitasking, less content and app restrictions, and subsidized pricing. Just wondered if you think that may create itself a more fragmented market.
To which Steve Jobs answered :
I have a hard time envisioning what those strategies you mentioned are.
There are only two interpretations for this remark :
1. Who let clueless in on this call?
2. Have you been paying attention to a single thing I said for the past 15 minutes?
But Steve Jobs was pithy with a question on Adobe Flash. The same Flash Jobs called - in essence - a steaming pile of crap that will never see the light of day on an Apple portable device :
Q: Any updates on your stance on Flash?
A : Flash memory? We love flash memory.
And an amazing report about the AppleTV - already over 250,000 of them have been sold. We bought one and put it on display in our entryway, and we have to report it is amazing.
But the most powerful thing that caught our eyes was the simple admonition from Steve Jobs to everyone listening in on the call :
You’re looking at it wrong.
Given the recent success of Apple, one would be foolish to not pay heed to this wisdom.