It isn’t easy being huge as both Apple and Microsoft are starting to realize. Both companies are incredibly successful and I’m not here to say either is in real danger, but both are suffering major structural challenges that will hurt them in 2016. What’s key for these predictions is how they respond.
I’ll deal with Microsoft first because there the challenges and solutions are both clearer than they are with Apple. I’ve been very impressed with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella who I think hasn’t saved the company, because it didn’t need saving, but he’s a real improvement over Steve Ballmer. Nadella has done the best he can to get Microsoft in order and reinvigorated, not an easy job. His major remaining challenges involve Windows Phone and Windows 10.
Windows Phone is a failure and Microsoft has had enough hacks at gaining that #1 or #2 spot it needs in the mobile market that it is probably time to give up. We’re seeing movement in this direction as Microsoft increases its support for iOS and, especially, Android. If there’s a prediction here it is that Windows Phone will die in 2016 and Microsoft will remake its mobile effort more along the lines of what IBM has been trying to do in its so-called partnership with Apple. There’s plenty of opportunity helping businesses with mobile applications so that’s where Microsoft will logically head. In the meantime there remains the headache of what to do with Ballmer’s final failed acquisition, Nokia’s phone business. Sell it? Write it off? Spin it off? Beats me.
Then there’s Windows 10, which has been a fantastic success almost entirely because it is a free upgrade. Apple can get away with making OS upgrades free because Apple makes lots of money on the hardware on which that OS runs. But Microsoft is a software company and at some point they probably expect to start charging for Windows 10. My gut says that won’t work well enough to fit Microsoft’s business plan, which means a crisis will ensue.
Microsoft is almost unique in its historic ability to leverage an operating system as a driver of market dominance. The only other company that even comes close in this regard is Red Hat. Some reversion is probably in order here and Windows may cease to be the business driver it has been in the past. I’m not saying Windows is going away, but the trend of Microsoft extracting a greater and greater percentage of the profit from every new PC sale is probably over. There just isn’t that much profit to be shared, for one thing. And for another the entire PC market has probably peaked. Microsoft’s business is shifting, possibly to the cloud. It will be interesting to see how they react as this unfolds in 2016.
Now to Apple, a company that appears from the outside to be entering a management crisis. Apple needs to pioneer new market categories because the international expansion that has driven the company’s growth for the past five years is almost complete. But Apple is not like other companies so here’s where we have to ask a fundamental question: does Tim Cook give a damn about Wall Street? I simply don’t know. Every other business writer would say that he does give a damn because, well, that’s what CEOs of huge public companies are supposed to do. But I’m not sure Cook does care. Nor am I even sure he should care. In fact I’m pretty sure he shouldn’t.
If Tim Cook does care about Wall Street then he should step up his game, do something dramatic, and show the world anew that he is the logical successor to Steve Jobs. But you know it wouldn’t surprise me if Cook gave up his CEO job this year, moved to chairman, and let someone else worry about Apple day-to-day.
More likely, though, we’ll see 2016 as a year when Apple responds to this growth challenge not through new products or cutting costs (Apple’s sales-per-employee are so high that cutting costs is close to useless) but through financial engineering. Cook isn’t going to be rushed into anything. And if we ignore products and markets for a moment Apple’s greatest challenge is that $200 billion in cash it holds, mainly offshore. Cook and Apple hope for a tax amnesty of sorts because they don’t want to pay an $80 billion tax bill. President Hillary is unlikely to give such a gift to Apple so some other strategy will probably be required.
Let’s think of this in a different way. Forget that the company is Apple. If any company with that much money stashed overseas went to Goldman Sachs for help what advice would they get? The rocket scientists at Goldman would come up with some complicated scam involving derivative securities and special purpose entities to serve the dual purpose of lowering Apple’s tax exposure while satisfying shareholders through share buybacks and rising dividends. IBM has shown how to play these games, propping-up its stock for years and Apple can easily do the same. Which is to say for Apple 2016 is likely to be a year of such shenanigans while waiting for new products that will actually come in 2017.
agreed, abandon windows phone and focus on IOS and Android. Save money on development, make money on software and services, win/win.
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“Sell it? Write it off? Spin it off? ”
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Why not all three?
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Financial shenanigans might well work for Apple if it is alongside a decent product/service offering. Don’t need another IBM all sizzle (wall street wise) and no steak.
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I think MS hates all-things Google and I don’t doubt for a minute that they’d try something like IBM is doing with a “strategic synergy” relationship with Apple. In other words, Apple making an Enterprise push with MS-centric iOS installs in exchange for porting full-office to iPad Pro or something like that.
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MS even killed its Android-to-Universal-Apps initiative in Visual Studio NOT because it was too hard, but because the porting process exceeded all expectations. Developers could port Android apps over effortlessly, because Windows Phone would, in effect, be running an Android layer as well. MS instead killed that and is forcing Android devs to recompile their code, just like iOS devs have to in Visual Studio.
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Let’s not forget that Google is eating MS & Apple’s lunch in the education market with Chromebook sales, and even B2B sales of Chromebooks were skyrocketing in the last half of 2015. Google is a serious threat to MS, and MS knows it.
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MS has lost the “consumer” through idiotic decisions over the years, but by partnering with Apple, I bet they think that’ll be their way to “stay cool & hip” and keep their services in front of the masses, who in turn will want to use MS stuff in the workplace.
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Because, let’s face it, when Millennials and younger gens enter the workforce, they’ll likely stare blankly at the name Microsoft because they either were never taught how to use the stuff (vs. Google Docs or iOS stuff) or barely were exposed to it in K-12. MS’s real problem is about 10 years from now, when Millennials who dislike anything non-iOS/Android are in charge of IT decisions.
I’ll miss windows phone, they had good value for the dollar and when they still offered a Mac utility, fairly useful without a full size Windows machine. Their best remaining move may be to give away the OS and see how many of those phone owners buy in to the ecosystem.
“Microsoft’s business is shifting, possibly to the cloud.” It’s possible the whole industry focus on the cloud will be a mistake. The big picture is increasingly hostile nation-states and increasing dependence on the internet for the economy and infrastructure. This makes large scale cyber attacks by nation-states increasingly likely. Should that occur, “the cloud” will dissolve like their water vapor physical namesakes on a hot, dry day.
As a longtime Windows phone user it hurts to think about it’s end of life, but it is getting harder to stay on WP and not seriously consider moving to either IOS or Android, even with using the WP10 preview. The killer for me was BoA dropping app support last year, not to mention few good new apps out there.
That said though, i think the wildcard with what MS does with WP might rests with the Continuum feature. The ability to allow me to carry one device for work that can act as my mobile device and can be my laptop is attractive. Of course the W10 app store needs to be a staple for developers building apps which it is second best now.
Perhaps I’m holding on too tight… My kids would agree with that thought as they have long since moved to IOS.
Bank of America is returning to Windows Phone, thanks to Windows 10 Universal apps.
I agree that Continuum may be the killer app. This takes the Asus concept of a couple years ago and gives you basically a Windows 10 desktop from your Windows Mobile device. I have the dock to go along with my 950XL, but I haven’t tried it out yet.
I absolutely love Windows Mobile, although the Windows 10 transition hasn’t been smooth, and my 950XL has so far been a bit disappointing.
I don’t see Microsoft abandoning the platform this year, they have way too much invested in it. If they can’t get things turned around by the end of the year, it may be on the chopping block.
“President Hillary” ??? Is that prediction #4?
Looking at what the Republicans are putting up, one would hope that it’s a prediction and that it’s correct. Because as much as I don’t care for Hillary Clinton, the Republicans are clearly insane.
Re: “Republicans are clearly insane”. Sometimes you gotta fight fire with fire. Philosophically, it’s conservatism vs. socialism, which is more important than the personalities representing those points of view.
No it isn’t socialism vs conservatism; unfortunately it is socialism vs wacko fundamentalist idiots. I had voted a cross between independent and Republican for ?40 years. The past 10 or so the Reps have been so disgusting I can’t even dream of voting for one for pres. Really sad.
Of course we are all against “wacko fundamentalist idiots” but their policies will never be enacted into law, since there are too many people opposed to that kind of extremism. The unrestrained growth of the federal government is more subtle, especially since it’s all motivated by good intentions. The primary role of the federal government should be protection from external, foreign, threats, with the state and local governments (which don’t have the power to print money) taking care of, and being directly funded by, their own citizens.
Uh, no matter who wins in November, Obama will remain president for all of 2016 (or whomever is in line of succession – which does not include Clinton or Trump – if needed…).
Obama’s useless for all of 2016. No one wants to hear what he has to say and no one wants to be part of any plans he has. He’s a lame duck, as are all Presidents when they enter their final year or two of office in the second term.
Lame duck or not, there’s no way he or anyone in his executive branch will be throwing a bone to Apple that’ll get that giant pile of cash back onshore. And it’s pretty clear something profound has to change for the Republicans to enter the 2016 race, something which would involve not flipping off voters in the ideological middle, and that’s not what major personalities on the right have been able to do in the past 20 years.
Yet Bush was elected twice during the oughts.
I agree that Windows Mobile is a failure, in the sense that it’s in 3rd place with no hope of that changing. The mobile phone market has matured; there’s not much left to do. The problem with Windows Mobile is not that it doesn’t have the major apps that all people want. It’s that it doesn’t have the minor apps that some people want. You didn’t mention Microsoft’s goal of making it easy to migrate iOS and Android apps to their platform. I’ve heard little about it since it was announced. If it fails to attractive developer attention, I agree that Microsoft should kill the platform, then concentrate on apps and whatever it thinks the next big thing will be.
I also agree that the most exciting things in Apple’s future will not come this year. I don’t think the bloom is off the iPhone rose just yet, though. There are still plenty of people who haven’t upgraded to a big screen yet. I’d say the biggest growth drivers for Apple in the short term will be the next Apple Watch (when they finally get it right) and Apple TV (when the real apps start appearing). Not sure if that will be enough to sustain the stock price for a year though…
As for the “real” cloud services out there, Amazon is king and it will take a huge investment to dethrone it. I don’t think Google, Microsoft, or Apple believe the benefits will outweigh the costs.
Tim Cook would have to consider what Wall St thinks. If he displeases “The Street” Apple share price will drop which in turn means his own shares will lose value too. That is how CEOs are caught in a bind. Selling any sizable amount of shares could also spook investors.
Apple could set up a VC fund and invest in the most promising startups and operate them as skunk works. It worked for the original Macintosh and in a way with NeXT too. Today’s Macs are direct descendent of those two “projects”.
Windows Phone has had some success in Latin America, not sure it’s enough to keep it afloat.
Apple will go full bore in VR. Google cardboard has shown what a great experience VR can be with a phone that wasn’t designed for it. Imagine Apple with integrated software and hardware. They will sell 3d movies through itunes, their will be games galore. Their VR headgear will be well designed, it’ll come in 2 flavors, for iphone 7, or 7Plus, and it will drive sales of the plus. It’ll come with 2 controllers that look a bit like the original wii controllers, simple, but representing hands.
It’s way too early for Apple to get into the VR market. They always come in to new markets late, after competing devices have been on sale for at least a year, with their “Let us show you how it’s done!” version. It’s the same story with the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad (compared to full desktop OS tablet PCs), the iPad Mini, Apple Watch, and so on.
How can somebody be late to a new market? Isn’t that a contradiction of terms? 🙂
Coming in late to a new market = that market isn’t quite so “new” anymore.
To Ivan’s point above: you can’t come in late to a market you yourself have created. This was clearly the case with Apple and their various iDevices.
In VR, though, I agree with you inasmuch as I don’t really see VR as a new market anymore.
Rupe
Apple didn’t create the media player market with the iPod, the smartphone market with the iPhone, the tablet computer market with the iPad, or the smart watch market with the Apple Watch.
*chuckle* You’ve been so wrong in your predictions about Apple in the past that it’s not surprising you start off with “hits a wall” in the title and water it down with wiggle words and hedges like “it wouldn’t surprise me if Cook gave up his CEO job this year, moved to chairman, and let someone else worry about Apple day-to-day”–compared to 2012 when you wrote “Prediction #1: A new CEO for Apple … Cook will take the chairman’s job and find another CEO.”
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It’s like Gene Munster embarrassing himself by predicting that Apple will finally release a TV set year after year! 🙂
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Now, I’ll go with you that Tim Cook really doesn’t need to care much, if at all, about Wall Street. Pretty much everything you wrote about Apple after wondering whether he did need to care about Wall Street was predicated on the answer being “yes,” so all that can just be wiped out with a stroke if it does indeed turn out that Cook decides to not pay them any more attention than he has been for the past few years.
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The final wiggle is “for Apple 2016 is likely to be a year of such shenanigans while waiting for new products that will actually come in 2017.” I’ll disagree with the “such shenanigans” (in the financial market), but largely agree that 2016 for Apple is likely to be a year of modest updates, rather than big new product launches. It’s not like they weren’t busy in 2015, with the Apple Watch, iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, new Apple TV, Apple Music, and new 12″ MacBook, plus the usual yearly updates to iOS, Mac OS X, and new “S” models of two iPhones (rather than just their usual one).
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Of course the problem with this wiggling is that besides guaranteeing that you’re going to be 50% right, you’re also guaranteeing that you’re going to be 50% wrong! 🙂
Amusingly, looking back at Bob’s 2015 predictions, there’s this line: “Apple can and will continue to grow in 2015 based on current products and expanding into new markets. For 2016 Apple will need something new and I predict they’ll get it.” which contradicts this year’s line “we’ll see 2016 as a year when Apple responds to this growth challenge not through new products or cutting costs…”
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So, is that a point off for the 2015 predictions? 🙂
No, predictions for 2016 made in 2014 don’t count against 2015.
“hits a wall” is referring to these 2 companies basically reaching a point of having nothing else to do besides shuffle deck chairs. Now, that remark implies they’re both sinking, but that’s not true…it just means they’re both so big, there’s nowhere naturally for them to go but down.
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So yeah, I could see Tim looking to move on – in 2014 Apple got its newest CFO in years…and a couple years of Apple experience in sounds good to Tim. Gotta remember that most CEOs come from being CFOs.
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I don’t think Tim loves being CEO. In his most recent interview on 60 Minutes in December, he became very un-CEO-like with his tantrum over tax questions. I think he became CEO out of duty and obligation to Steve…but I bet he never actually wanted to be the top guy.
Tim is very calculating and shrewd. He did the same thing at a quarterly shareholders meeting when someone questioned the value of Apple’s green initiatives. The word is that when someone is in a meeting with Tim and he’s dissatisfied with that person, he can be fierce. So he’s just careful to keep a very calm, level, and affable exterior for the public’s perception, and he only lets out a little of what’s behind that when he wants to strongly make a point.
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Anyway, I can’t imagine anywhere Tim Cook would rather be, now or for the foreseeable future. How do you “move on” from being CEO of the world’s most valuable company, that has the goal of making the highest quality products?
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He didn’t *want* the job when Steve Jobs was still alive, because he wanted Steve to be the one still doing it! It was never his ambition to dethrone the king. But I’ve no doubt he considers it his mission to keep “the king’s legacy” alive and successful, for as long as he personally can.
If Microsoft was smart they’d start cranking out Nokia phones with Android. They could create some apps that could handle Office files and Exchange email really well and bundle them with the phones. They need to forget the OS. That is not their real competitive advantage. It is Office and Exchange.
Why, when they can just sit back and rake in the cash for licensing VFAT, Exchange and whatever other patents are required to ship a market-viable Android phone? They know better than anyone what happens when other people control your hardware’s OS.
(1) Microsoft should sell the phone division BACK TO NOKIA. That would be a grand ending to the whole debacle. Nokia would then have the opportunity to layoff everyone in Redmond while keeping anyone who’s left in Finland.
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(2) Yes Microsoft isn’t charging for the Windows 10 upgrade, but they are still charging for Office, so the OS finally is just a gimmick to sell Office. Frankly Microsoft could abandon Windows in 2017 or 2018 and run and sell Office as a browser app (something Netscape tried to implement back in the 1990s and failed).
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(3) I looking for Apple to deliver a 4K TV that (i) supports current HD, (ii) is modestly higher resolution and (iii) incompatible with all other 4K standards.
Is #3 a prediction or a request?
Well, 3 iii would be the sort of thing that Apple would do.
It doesn’t look like you’ve considered one reason why Microsoft is “giving away” Windows 10 – the addition of various telemetry that phones home to Redmond on a regular basis with what you’re doing/looking at/searching for etc. This isn’t just Cortana but a core part of Windows 10 itself. Maybe this is why Microsoft is so keen on Windows 7/8/8.1 users upgrading to Windows 10: they’re trying to out “Google” Google. Google may be able to track your every step around the internet with the possibility of scanning your email and calendar; but Microsoft can go that ultimate step further as it has access, via Windows, to everything on your desktop.
See the two Register articles about this (with links to many others) with extensive forum posts detailing how annoyed users that know about these telemetry additions are:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/05/microsoft_200_million_windows_10_devices/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/15/microsoft_sneaky_about_pushing_windows_10/
Microsoft aren’t offering this update free out of compassionate philanthropy they’re doing it for a keen business reason – something confirmed by the downright devious ways they’re trying to slip/force Windows 10 onto machines running Windows 7/8/8.1. I’d say it was because they wanted to know more about you to sell adverts, but watching Microsoft over the last 20 years I’d wonder if there was something a lot more sinister (and self preserving) about it.
As the saying goes – if you’re not paying money to use it you’re the product, not the customer.
Yes. It is extremely disappointing that Cringely refers to Windows 10 as a “fantastic success” and completely ignores all the controversy surrounding it. No one I know, who does anything remotely complex with Windows, i.e, beyond web browsing, word processing and watching movies, has succumbed to updating their Windows 7 systems, and even a number of less techy friends have asked me to stop their systems from nagging them about it. Not a “fantastic success” here. I would like to see Cringely go into all of the issues that have been raised in detail.
How do you stop the nagging. I got it to go away, then it came back.
The nagging ws a clue that something funny was going on.
Microsoft would be trying to reduce their support costs by getting as many customers as possible onto the current software, just like every other software company. What use to them is a desktop that can’t run their latest products?
Somewhat hidden in Microsoft’s revenue numbers has been a very strong growth trajectory in cloud based revenue, be it in Office 365, or Dynamics Online or any of the other Azure hosted products and services. The strategy is unmistakably to focus on grabbing and maintaining a large market share (if not outright dominance) in cloud based consumer and enterprise applications, while at the same time maintaining a hold on the user’s desktop through free Windows upgrades.
I am not sure Microsoft cares much about the success (or failure) of Windows Phone. Maybe the Surface Phone will be able to piggyback on Surface’s success, but either way it seems clear that Microsoft has already left that building.
When Nadella says, Mobile and Cloud is the new mantra, what he seems to be aiming for is Cloud on Mobile, if Microsoft’s own quarterly announcements are anything to go by. In fact it is refreshing to see Microsoft once again recognizing, acknowledging and leveraging it’s true areas of strength – which are enterprise software, application software, and Windows. Instead of hitting a wall, this looks like a company that is sweetly poised to once again lead and/or dominate in a very wide application portfolio, and this time in a SaaS model.
But are they making strong profits with cloud?
Or it is just cotton candy, all fluffs and nothing substantial.
MS has already deprecated Project Astoria — their initiative to emulate Android apps on Windows Phone. Apparently the user experience is just not good enough, so at the very least an Android collaboration is on hold for this year.
MS is going forward with Project Islandwood, which is straight ports of iOS apps that run natively in Windows Phone.
Apple is a fashion company not a technology company. It is all about being cool.
Microsoft is at least trying to do new tech. They may not be successful but at least they are trying.
Any tech company on earth would love to be just “a fashion company” with all the technology patents that Apple’s engineers have created and Apple has registered.
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I’m not sure what just “a fashion company” would do with things like Apple’s A-series processors, or the Swift programming language, or the WebKit browser rendering engine, or the Metal graphics library, or QuickTime, though.
I’m pretty sure at least one ( maybe two… more? ) of those things weren’t invented by apple but were more or less renamed… or re-labelled if you prefer. 😉
Another question… why did Apple rely on design patents so prominently vs others tech patents. I can’t remember Apple’s tech patents… just rounded corners and swipe to unlock!?!? Magnetic power connectors come to mind… but rice-cookers have had ’em for years.
Apple’s A-series processors are based on ARM, and WebKit is based on the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE, but they’re in no way just “renamed” or “re-labelled” versions of those. The other technologies I listed were developed whole cloth at Apple, and there are plenty more that I didn’t name.
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As for design patents compared to technology patents, in many cases it’s easier to win court cases based on them. Apple still won probably just as many of their judgements on technology patents too, though.
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And don’t fool yourself that other companies wouldn’t love to also be able to leverage design patents. They’re simply not able to do so because they’re just not coming up with them!
How can you declare Nokia to be a failure, when at the time you declared it an instant success becaause it was really just money laundering?
Couldn’t Apple just buy Nokia from Microsoft and achieve the same results?
“Apple needs to pioneer new market categories because the international expansion that has driven the company’s growth for the past five years is almost complete.”
As others have pointed out, Apple has really never been a pioneer, at least not since the Sculley days. That’s not what Apple does. They create a “curated” experience, where maybe you don’t get the bleeding edge of technology (I really like those new Casio Android wear watches), but you’ll get something that seems to have a little more thought put into it over a rushed product that you’ll be replacing in 9 months.
The watch is an exception. It feels like it’s half baked. Very much a 1.0 or beta product. The hardware is fine, but the software doesn’t have the polish I expect, or the little details that make Apple products feel like someone was sweating the small stuff.
The one thing they’ve been doing very well, at least to me, is the whole Continuity ecosystem. The watch, the iPhone, iPad and Macbook all talk to each other, and that’s really fantastic for locking customers into your products. Yes it’s possible to do most of that through cloud stuff or Google stuff or even Exchange stuff, but the “it just works” part is what is compelling.
Disagree on Windows Phone. Now that Win 10 is one OS, MS is going to have the largest App Store in the world. I don’t like them to take down Android, but I think iOS is running out of steam and Apple isn’t as cool as it used to be. Not that iPhone is going away, but I think they will lose share. Never count MS out. They don’t mind blowing a few billion to get it to work.
Actually one of Microsoft’s problems is that they try to target Apple when they *should* be targeting Google/Android. People who like cheap commodity hardware and the ability to tinker with it have always been Microsoft’s core supporters, and those people are currently choosing Android over iOS (and Windows Phone). People who like iOS, on the other hand, value things that Apple is always going to be at the top of the game on, so it’s much more of an uphill battle to get their attention. Also, Apple’s ecosystem is much stickier than Google/Android’s. There’s much more defection from Android to iOS than the other way around, so Microsoft should be specifically targeting *those* users, and trying to get them to switch from Android to Windows Phone/Surface/whatever, instead of switching to iOS. They’re the ones who are already looking over the fence, so they’re more vulnerable to persuasion.
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Besides, with iPhones at only ~14% of worldwide market share, there’s so many more Android users to try to convert that it only makes sense. Microsoft would have to convert over 7% of all iPhone users just to add 1% of total phone market share, while they’d only need to convert 1.3% of all Android phone users to gain the same in total share. That’s a much easier target.
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As for iOS “running out of steam”: The “analysts” and trade rags like that story as it makes for good clickbait, and they keep trotting it out every year. And they’re also wrong every year. They simply never have actual good data to work from, as Apple keeps all their real supply and sales metrics very close to their chest.
“Microsoft is almost unique in its historic ability to leverage an operating system as a driver of market dominance.”
Disagree. IBM with MVS, now z/OS, achieved market dominance. They wrapped hardware around it, but it was really the platform which gave them control. Amdahl made alternative hardware for MVS, but wasn’t foolish enough to fight the IBM stack. IBM’s mainframe OS ecosystem gave Gates and Ballmer the idea. Also, Apple with iOS… again wrapped in hardware, but the platform gave them the App Store and all their stickiness. Android, until iPhone 6 at least, had objectively better hardware.
I think Microsoft will be fine. Yes, they have a mobile problem, but that is it… everything else is going really well. Who would have thought five years ago that MS would be Amazon’s largest competitor? Not me, but they are really hitting it out of the park on the B2B side… challenges in the B2C business not withstanding. The new Surfaces, speaking as a former Surface hater, are pretty damn good. Got to hand it to them.
Agree on Apple though.
“Yes, they have a mobile problem, but that is it”
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Oh, is *that* all? Too bad that mobile is now the driving force of the industry, and there are many times more mobile devices now than traditional desktop computing devices. And that the market for traditional desktop computing devices has been contracting, and is only going to continue to do so.
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Too bad for Microsoft, that is.
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“Don’t pay attention to that severed artery; it’s the patient’s lung cancer we really need to worry about!”
If mobile were so important, they should make shoes. Sure, we all have a smartphone now, but I still need a pc to get stuff done. Windows Mobile, iOS, and Android still don’t cut it.
When it comes to raw horsepower, Mobile’s saving grace will be the cloud. Short of discovering some new physics, there is no way they are going to be able to cram in the specs of an i7 into a mobile phone.
You don’t need i7. I’ve been running Windows NON-mobile (Vista, 7, 8, now 10) on an Intel Atom 1.86 GHz 5″ UMPC since 2009. It even docks to a full sized keyboard and monitor for desktop use. The problem isn’t the hardware but the crippled mobile OSs and their apps needed to prolong battery life. So far “the cloud” and the apps that work with it have been a last resort for me. Google Drive comes in handy at times for storage, but can’t beat a local version of Notepad.
The segment of the worldwide market for computing devices who can get all they need done on a smartphone already vastly dwarfs those who need a desktop/laptop, and it’s only getting larger. Meanwhile PC sales are on a steady decline. You’re in the minority already.
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(I’ll admit, I’m there, too. I like the three screens on my desktop and many gigabytes of local storage. But this isn’t about me. Or you.)
Apple needs to find and create a new massive consumer product like the iPhone that can benefit from the Apple brand. iCar seems complicated and liability minefield. How about an iMaid that can cook, clean and do other nice things?
Yeah, you can count on Goldman Sachs for an “idea”,
but put on deodorant first.
and Windows? suffered it for 20 years, and estimate that I spent a full year of my life fixing it (no joke)
only an idiot would stick with Windows and MS and a “PC” which for equiv capability is more expensive than Apple (they do have cheap low performance junk though).
And Apple needs to change the world AGAIN? would be nice, but you say that MS can toddle on to success without doing much of anything? You are sort of a Microsoft bigot, right?
This probably should be titled: “Predictions #3 (and 4?): Microsoft and Apple hit walls”
Apple is fortunate to be too large to be attacked by the hyenas of Wall Street. For instance, if Apple were 1/10 the size (say, 70B or so) sitting on 20B in cash, the raiders would all over Cook to get at that cash in the name of “returning value to the shareholders”. At 700B, the whale is too big, and Cook has a bit of residual Jobs aura (although not as valuable as a Bezos aura).
If Apple starts to shrink too much, they end up like IBM– shrink a little too much then having to pro-actively dispose of cash and value to avoid being harried into oblivion by raiders (think: Akers for a near oblivion event; or we could look at the destruction of HP…). Then with no cash for long term new development where do you end up?
Apple’s problem is more about the golden 200B goose egg and how to convert the goose egg into new products and revenue instead of being dissipated by non-productive greed driven parasites– internal or external.
>president shillary
The bitch should and will be in jail.
AVE TRVMP