Tag: apple

The tough world of smartphones

Competing in the smartphone market is tough as Dell have discovered.

Dell’s announcement they are going to exit the Smartphone business – for the second or possibly even third time – comes on the same day Nielsen release a survey showing smartphones are now the bulk of US mobile phone purchases.

For Dell this shows the problem they have in being locked into the commodity PC business, what was once a lucrative business is now suffering softening margins and slowing sales. In desperation they are looking to other product lines but struggle to differentiate themselves in other markets.

The difficulties of doing this in the smartphone sector is shown in Nielsen’s analysis of what phones are selling.

Of those sold in the last three months, a whopping 43% were Apple products while 48% were Google Android devices.

Even more frightening in those Nielsen figures is Blackberry’s collapse where the Canadian product has 12% of the market but only 5% of sales in recent months. It’s little wonder Blackberry’s owner RIM is laying off senior managers.

For Microsoft, that only 4% of phones were “other” than Android, Apple or RIM show just how tough the task of selling Windows Phone is going to be, something that won’t be helped with dumb marketing stunts.

Google’s apparent success in mobile isn’t all that it seems either; while the Android platform has nearly half the smartphone market it doesn’t appear to be particularly profitable.

The Guardian’s Charles Arthur looked at a number of legal cases involving Google’s mobile patents and extrapolated the claimed damages to get an estimate of how much Google earns from Android.

Arthur estimates Android has earned Google $543 million dollars between 2008 and 2011 which, given Google’s mobile revenues last year were claimed to be $2.5 billion last year, indicates Google makes more money from Apple devices than it does from its own products.

While Arthur’s estimates are debatable, they show how Apple’s profits dominate the smartphone market. Google, like Dell in computers, are locked into the commodity, low margin end of the market.

Just as Dell have learned that entering new markets doesn’t guarantee success, Google may have to learn the same lesson.

To be fair to Google, at least management are aware of being too dependent upon one major source of revenue.

Whether mobile services built around the Android platform can provide an alternative cashflow of similar size to their web advertising services remains to be seen.

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Insanely profitable

Apple change the game again with some major ramifications

Apple’s announcement that they will start paying dividends to shareholders changes a number of things in Apple’s business model and those of many other businesses.

The sheer size of Apple’s cash reserves also illustrate how profitable the outsourced manufacturing model is as well the contradictary nature of special pleading by affluent corporations.

Moving a cash mountain

Not only is Apple’s business insanely profitable, but sales are growing exponentially. In the company’s conference call, CEO Tim Cook reported that 37 million iPhones sold last quarter and 55 million iPads sold in the last two years.

Apple’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer pointed out the company’s cash reserves increased $31 billion in 2011 and 2012 is on track for a similar result in 2012, leaving them plenty of money for investment along with a “warchest for strategic opportunities”.

Paying a dividend

The reluctance to pay dividends has been a feature of the US corporate for the last few decades and Apple are certainly not alone in not distributing their profits to shareholders.

Companies like Microsoft, Google and Oracle -even Yahoo! once upon a time – have been just as profitable as Apple and their efforts to shrink their cash mountains has had some perverse effect.

Many of these companies have squandered suprpluses on poorly thoughtout and badly executed buyouts of smaller businesses, this urge to avoid returning money to owner has been one of the drivers of the Silicon Valley VC Greater Fool model.

Another result of fat profits is the rise of flabby, overstaffed management ranks at some of these companies. Although this certainly isn’t the case at Apple where Steve Jobs ran a very lean machine.

The retail model

Unlike their major tech competitors Apple is a manufacturing and retail business as well. In 2012, 40 new stores are planned around the world.

This vertical control of their markets, from the beginings of the supply chain  to “owning” the end customer is anathema to modern MBA thinking and probably the area that gives them the greatest competitive advantage over their hardware competitors.

Justifying Mike Daisy

In some ways this announcement justfies Mike Dasy’s discredited criticisms about Apple’s Chinese suppliers.

The reason for manufacturing these goods in places like China, India or Vietnam is the vastly cheaper cost of doing business, not just in labour rates but in reduced environmental and safety standards.

Plenty of brand name clothing, footware and fashion accessory companies make similar massive profits to Apple with their ten, twenty and sometimes hundred fold markups on their products.

Repatriating profits

One of the big changes of Apple repatriating money is that is undercuts the special pleading by these extremely profitable companies that they should have a US tax holiday so they can repatriate their riches.

It’s now clear these companies can easily afford to pay the taxes of their home countries and it’s time they started to, along with returning dividends to their shareholders.

Once again Apple have changed the way others do business, how these changes affect the way we invest and governments treat companies is going to be one of the most interesting developments over the next decade.

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So you call that journalism?

Is it time we drew a line between journalism and entertainment?

On  the revelation his expose of Apple’s employment practice contains “significant fabrications”, Mike Daisy reached for the  “I am not a journalist and “my work is entertainment” excuses.

This gutless and disingenuous defence is a common one used by those caught distorting facts or outright lying to advance their causes and enrich themselves.

Perhaps the Mike Daisy expose, along with the sad events around the Stop Kony campaign, should make us consider who is a journalist and what journalism is.

Is journalism reporting the facts as we seem them or describing the world around us? If so, does a “journalist” have to work for an established and recognised media outlet?

The modern idea of warrior, professional journalism was born in the 1930s with celebrity journalists like Ernest Hemingway or Evelyn Waugh reporting from Spain or Ethiopia.

In the 1960s we saw this idea become established through the Vietnam war and reached its peak in the early 1970s with the Watergate scandal.

Today, someone who is an actor by trade can be appointed as the technology correspondent by a newspaper and automatically become a credible journalist in their field.

At the same time someone with years of experience in their field — it could be food, travel, technology or anything else — is sneeringly derided as a “citizen journalist” by those who draw a cheque from the established, and dying, media should they decide to self publish.

The sad thing is much of what is published as “journalism” by the established media outlets is entertainment and many of the “facts” reported are self interested propaganda promoting the latest music star or pushing a political agenda.

All too often, those claiming to be credible journalists are being used to give the illusion of of credibility on things that simply aren’t true at all.

We need to re-evaluate what journalism is and how misleading and self-interested reporting distorts debate, markets and the democratic process.

A start would be in ditching the “journalism as entertainment” meme.

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Who will be the future Betamaxes?

A modern version of the video tape standard wars is being fought on our phones

This morning Paypal announced its PayPal Here service, a gizmo that turns a smartphone into a credit card reader.

On reading PayPal’s media release in the pre-dawn, pre-coffee light I found myself grumpily muttering “which platforms?” as the announcement kept mentioning “smartphones” without saying whether it was for iPhone, Android or other devices.

It turns out to be both Google Android and Apple iOS. It adds an interesting twist to the Point Of Sale market we’ve looked at recently.

The omission of platforms like Windows Phone raises the question of which platforms are going to go the way of Betamax?

Sony’s Betamax and JVC’s VHS systems were the dominant competitors in the video tape market in the early 1980s. They were totally incompatible with each other and users had to make a choice if they wanted to join one camp or the other when they went to buy a video recorder.

On many measures Betamax was the better product but ultimately failed because VHS offered longer program times and Panasonic’s licensing out of their technology meant there were more cheaper models on the market.

A few days ago Bloomberg Businessweek listed the Betamax device as one of the “technology’s failed promises”

With a superficial comparison, Apple would seem to the Betamax while Google and possibly Microsoft are the VHS’s given their diverse range of manufacturers their systems run on and Apple’s refusal to license out iOS, which was one of the reasons for Sony’s failure.

But it isn’t that simple.

In the smartphone wars, it’s difficult to compare them to VCRs as the video tape companies never controlled content and advertising the way smartphone systems do – although Sony did buy Columbia Studios at the peak of the Japanese economic miracle in 1987.

This control of content is what makes the stakes so high in the smartphone and tablet operating systems war. A developer or business that dedicates their resources to one platform could find themselves stranded if that platform fails or changes their terms of services to the developer’s detriment.

Another assumption is there is only room for one or two smartphone systems; it could turn out the market is quite happy with two, three or a dozen different systems and incompatibilities can be overcome with standards like HTML5.

In a funny way, it could turn out to be Android becomes the Smartphone Betamax due to having too diverse a range of manufacturers.

One of the first questions that jumps out when someone announces a new Android app is “which version?” The range of Android versions on the market is confusing customers and not every app will run on each version.

More importantly for financial apps like PayPal Here and Google Wallet, smartphone updates include critical security patches so many of the older phones that miss out on updates pose a risk to the users.

In the financial world confidence is everything and if customers aren’t confident their money is safe or will be promptly refunded in the event of fraud they won’t use the service.

Whether this uncertainty will eventually deal Google out of the game or present an opportunity for Microsoft and other companies is going to be one of the big questions of the mobile payments market.

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Channel blues

Cloud computing is changing the IT industry

“We do the pre-sales work then they come along and steal the customers. It’s wrong, just wrong” growled the sales manager of an IT integrator while talking about one of the leading cloud computing services.

The business model of systems integrators is to be a company’s, or home’s, trusted advisor on IT and make money from charging for their services and the profit in selling software and equipment.

In the last few years that model has become tough – the collapsing price of hardware has made the profits on selling systems leaner while the increased life of systems has meant the big lucrative upgrades have become scarcer.

At the same time services have become less lucrative as more participants have entered the market, many using offshored cheap labour to provide remote support. It hasn’t helped that computers have become vastly more reliable, particularly since Microsoft have largely solved Windows’ gaping security holes.

The icing on the cake has been the end of boxed software and corporate licenses. These were extremely profitable for the systems integrator – a big sale of Microsoft Office or Oracle licenses to a government department could see an IT salesperson pay for a holiday home or cover the kids’ school and college fees.

Cloud computing has largely been the driver of all of these factors’ decline and now it is really hurting those integrators and their salesfolk who were used to a very profitable existence.

While that’s good news for computer consumers – and even better news for hapless shareholder and taxpayers who’ve been largely dudded by big IT sales pitches to gullible directors and ministers – it does beg the question of how customers now get advice and support.

Largely cloud based services rely upon customer self service and many of the providers would struggle to include user support in their list of core competencies.

There’s a business model there for systems integrators, but it’s difficult to see how many those used to fat profits in the past can, or will, adapt to the new environment.

An interesting side effect of this change is how it affects companies like Microsoft where their channel partners – largely those big and small systems integrators – are one of the most important distribution networks for their products and probably their best defense against competitors like Google and Apple. That strength is being steadily eroded.

It’s tempting to think that change affects just “old” industries like retail, publishing or car manufacturing; in reality it affects all sectors and sometimes the most modern might be hurt more than the established players.

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Reputation’s long tail

Cutting customer support costs in many ways

When you decide customer support is an unnecessary cost, you make a statement that defines your position in the market place. Dell are reaping the consequences of this now.

Micheal Dell, CEO and founder of Dell Computers, hopes to grab some of the tablet computer market from Apple with the release of Microsoft Windows 8.

It’s a big goal – Apple have owned the tablet computer market since launching the iPad.

Dell, along with most of the other PC manufacturers, squandered the decade’s head start they had in tablet computers with poorly designed and overpriced tablet PCs which were based around a clunky version of Microsoft Windows using styluses.

Part of the problem was Windows itself; the operating system was designed for desktop users and to make it work on tablet computers it required a clunky workaround. Being designed for smart phones and tables mean Windows 8 may overcome previous limitations.

But Dell have a problem; they are perceived as a low price, low quality supplier and have a competitor in Apple that has locked in the supply chain for the product.

So Dell will struggle to beat Apple on price while customers believe the Dell system is inferior.

Even more difficult for Dell is their support reputation, a quick look at the comments to the Bloomberg story illustrates the problem.

Of the the sixteen reader comments, admittedly not a scientific sample, three business owners claim they will never buy Dell again after customer support issues.

This is the critical mistake Dell’s management made in the 2000s – in order to cut costs so they could be profitable at lower price points they trashed their support.

Eventually this culminated in the Dell Hell debacle where Jeff Jarvis’ experience summed up the frustrations of thousands of Dell’s disillusioned customers.

Apple on the other hand chose not to go down the rabbit hole of cheap and nasty systems. Today they can offer free, and skilled, support in their genius bars as their fat margins allow them to provide constructive and helpful assistance to their customers.

Now Dell has the reputation for at best indifferent after sales service which means they are locked into competing on price and ever declining margins.

It’s not a good place to be for Dell but that’s what you get for treating your customers like an unnecessary nuisance while fixating on headline prices.

We often talk about the Internet’s long tail; our online reputations could be the longest tail of all.

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Navigating the Internet jungle

When we’re in the wild, we need to keep our wits about us.

I usually don’t pay much attention to stories about Apple malware given that most hysterical stories about Mac viruses are written by charlatans spruiking third rate security products.

The story of the Flashback Trojan is an interesting one though, not because the malware is particularly original or that it comes with the usual hysterical claim of being part of the coming wave of viruses that will wipe the smug smiles off Mac users’ facers.

Flashback’s interesting because it combines all the tactics of a modern computer virus or malware, bringing together unpatched vulnerabilities and some social engineering with the intention of stealing user passwords.

These are risks regardless of what type of computer, smartphone or tablet you use. It illustrates how the security risks have moved on since the first epidemic of Windows computer viruses just before the beginning of the century.

Similarly, the motivation for writing viruses and malware has evolved. Where it was once an intellectual exercise for bored, highly skilled young code cutters, today it’s a lucrative criminal enterprise aimed at getting access to victim’s bank accounts and other assets.

Which is the reason why it’s a good idea to have different passwords for various online services – no more using the same password for your online banking, Minecraft and Facebook accounts.

Having the latest security patches installed is also important, particularly with third party products like Adobe Flash, Java or Microsoft Office, so don’t ignore those warnings as a caller to one of my radio slots boasted.

We also need to keep our wits about us online and watch out for the sneaky tricks used to fool us into opening malware, it’s a jungle out here on the web.

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