Archive for November, 2012
The Opinion Cast (podcast): Market Share, Windows 8, and Profits
In this Opinion Cast we discuss a number of important topics related to the industry. Although the year is wrapping up, there is still a lot to discuss and opine about. Here is the topical overview from …
My Notebook and I are Growing Apart
I can’t help but have the feeling as of late that a close friend and I are growing more distant. These feelings are encapsulated with gratitude, sorrow, and also an understanding that it is for the better. …
Why Android’s Market Share Is No Threat To Apple’s iOS Platform
iOS Is Winning The Profit Battles
Everyone concedes that Apple’s iOS is currently winning the mobile profit battles. However, many pundits still contend that Apple is losing the mobile wars because Apple does not have the most market share. How can …
Open vs. Closed Systems: What the Future Holds
Since the beginning of the personal computing era. there has been a struggle for dominance between open and closed systems. The early open CP/M computers gave way to the relatively closed Apple ][. The closed Mac was beaten by the …
Dear Amazon: You don’t get to use words like “double”
On Tuesday, Amazon issued a press release entitled: “Worldwide Kindle Device Sales More Than Double Last Year’s Record Over Holiday Shopping Weekend.”
Here’s the thing, Amazon. You never told us last year’s sales numbers. In fact, you never told us ANY …
Dell XPS 12: Windows 8 Ultrabook Re-imagined
With the advent of Microsoft’s Windows 8, computer makers developed different form factors to take advantage of the new operating system. Most of these new Windows 8 form factors were shown for the first time at Computex in Taipei and …
Black Friday Is Morphing Into Black Week
Margaret Hartmann at New York Magazine postulates that Black Friday is morphing into Black Weekend:
According to the research firm ShopperTrak, sales on Friday were down 1.8 percent from last year, which is the first dip since the recession hit in …
The Curious Gap Between Android Market Share and Usage
There’s been plenty of debate in these pages and their comments about who is winning and who is losing in the battles between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Asymco’s Harace Dediu takes a close look at Thanksgiving weekend data from the …
Verizon, Nokia and the Quest for Differentiation
My first portable cellphone was the size of a brick and weighed almost 2 pounds. And it was dumb. All it did was make calls. By the mid 1990’s Verizon started creating what we now call a feature phone and …
Banking On The iPad
Barclays Bank has ordered 8,500 iPads in what is believed to be one of the largest corporate deployments of the device in the UK. ~ via TUAW
This kind of thing has got to be terrifying to Microsoft. Microsoft is losing …
It’s Going To Be A Very Apple-y Holiday Quarter
Tightwads, Value Buyers and Spendthrifts
Oscar Wilde once said that cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Similarly, tech pundits are often obsessed with price to the detriment of value. Despite all evidence to the contrary, pundits …
Why Competitors Should Fear the iPad Mini
We have been conducting tiers of research trying to gauge consumer sentiment around tablets and in particular of late, the iPad Mini. Part of my interest with this research is designed to get deeper insight into the 7″ …
The BlackBerry Death Spiral
“Notice of Intent to Sole Source iPhone Devices.” That dry headline, from a National Transportation Safety Board post on the Federal Business Opportunities web site, is news about as grim as it can get for Research in Motion. Though the …
Windows 8: Tepid Marketing–>Slow Sales
Kind of sad, isn’t it? This sorry attempt at a festive display of new PCs at a Micro Center store in Rockville, MD, says a lot about the thud with which Windows 8 seems to have landed.
Windows guru Paul Thurrott …
Samsung ATIV SmartPC 500T: Intel Strikes Back
Over the course of the Windows 8/RT industry discussions, ARM-based tablets have received the lion’s share of the discussion. This has been particularly true with Microsoft’s announcement of Surface RT. Does this mean Intel cannot deliver a competitive tablet solution? …