Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: tablet computers

  • Sunset on the laptop market

    Sunset on the laptop market

    Yesterday Toshiba released their Kira laptop computer – a premium device aimed at the ‘aspirational’ market.

    The Kira is a fine device with good specs, little weight and an ambitious $2,000 price point. It probably also marks the laptop computer’s decline.

    As tablet computers and smartphones become most people’s preferred computer devices, the laptop computer is becoming a niche device and increasingly less relevant to most technology users. The Kira is fighting for the share of a marketplace that has moved on.

    Losing the Aspirationals

    Unfortunately for Toshiba, those aspirational customers are locked into their Apple iPads and Sumsung smartphones. Laptops are seen as work devices more valued for their portability and cost.

    “We have to give our customers a reason to upgrade their computers,” said Mark Whittard, the Managing director of Toshiba Australia.

    The problem is computer users have little reason to upgrade, as nice as the Kira is the price point is just too high for customers who’ve been groomed to expect sub – thousand dollar systems and there are few compelling reasons to buy such a device.

    Caught in a pricing pincer

    Price points are probably the biggest problem for computer manufacturers – one of the reasons for the tablet computer’s success is they delivered an easy to use, portable computer for half the price of a portable computer.

    At the same time the rise of netbooks and the rush to dump unwanted Microsoft Vista and Windows 7 stock onto the market groomed customers to expect cheap computers – few computer buyers are interested in spending more than a thousand dollars on a device.

    These factors have squeezed the margins of the major manufacturers like Dell, HP and Asus.

    Those pressures are going to increase as volumes fall. For much of the 2000s, laptop computers were fast moving consumer goods – pricing and profits were based on moving large numbers of the devices.

    As manufacturing volumes fall, those devices are going to lose their economies of scale which will put further pressures on vendors’ margins.

    Laptops aren’t going away, they still have a role for power users ­– particularly for those, like this writer, who need a tactile keyboard and media editing capabilities.

    However those feature rich devices with their nice keyboards are going to cost more as parts become more expensive.

    For laptop vendors the challenge is to find the profitable market niches and exploit them. In some ways Toshiba probably has a better opportunity than most with its range of premium and gaming portable computers.

    Those in the market hoping the happy days of big volumes and good profits will return to the laptop PC market are in for a painful future. It’s something retailers, resellers and vendors need to understand.

    Similar posts:

  • Is there a tablet to cure the reality distortion field?

    Is there a tablet to cure the reality distortion field?

    It’s hard not to be impressed by the calibre of guests CNBC’s Squawk Box when they’re able to get Warren Buffett and Bill Gates on together for an interview.

    During the interview Bill Gates made an interesting assertion about Apple’s iPad, ““A lot of those users are frustrated, they can’t type, they can’t create documents, they don’t have Office there.”

    Bill’s undoubtedly right, some iPad users are frustrated by the device’s limitations. However for every irritated iPad user there are a dozen baffled by the lack of a Start button on Windows 8.

    The reality distortion field though is strong, “Windows 8 really is revolutionary,” says Bill. “It takes the benefits of the tablet and the benefits of the PC and it’s able to support both of those.”

    The Microsoft founder is enthusiastic about the company’s Windows tablet, “you have the portability of the tablet but the richness, in terms of the keyboard and Microsoft Office, of the PC.”

    It’s notable Gates mentioned Microsoft Office, particularly given the question was about the cloud. It’s clear one of Microsoft’s priorities is to maintain their strength with productivity applications and move with their customers onto the cloud.

    The problem though for Microsoft is that Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are dominating the cloud focused operating systems, leaving Windows behind.

    Making matters worse for Microsoft is it’s clear Windows 8 tablets are never going to catch their competitors. Consulting group Gartner last year predicted the global market for tablet computers will double over the next three years, but Microsoft will capture barely 10% of the sales.

     OS

    2011

    2012

    2013

    2016

    iOS

    39,998

    72,988

    99,553

    169,652

    Android

    17,292

    37,878

    61,684

    137,657

    Microsoft

    0

    4,863

    14,547

    43,648

    QNX

    807

    2,643

    6,036

    17,836

    Other Operating Systems

    1,919

    510

    637

    464

    Total Market

    60,017

    118,883

    182,457

    369,258

    Sitting in a reality distortion field is fine when things are going well and you dominate your world, but Microsoft – despite still being insanely profitable – no longer dominates the markets that made it into one of the world’s leading companies.

    The challenge for Bill Gates and Microsoft’s management is adapting to those changes, projecting your own frustrations onto the users of a competitor’s product, isn’t a recipe for success.

    Similar posts:

  • Is Thorsten Heins the world’s bravest executive?

    Is Thorsten Heins the world’s bravest executive?

    “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet any more,” Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins told Bloomberg TV while showing off his company’s new Q10 handset.

    Predicting the end of the tablet computer is a very brave call – particularly from a man whose company’s market share has fallen 90% since the iPhone was released – but does it have any merit?

    Thorsten’s view is the smartphone is the device most people rely on. Of the three ‘screens’ we use, the mobile phone is the one we rely on the most and it will be increasingly important as mobile payments, NFC and other technologies develop.

    Blackberry’s position is exactly the opposite of Microsoft’s ‘three screens’ strategy with Windows 8 where the aim is to have the same system running on phones, tablets and personal computers.

    Apple and Google have chosen to modify their systems, or even have totally different ones such as iOS and OSX, to suit different sized devices.

    Supporting the Blackberry view is the famous survey by the now defunct Nortel Networks in 2008 that found one third of workers would rather lose their wallet than their mobile.

    When that survey was carried out five years ago, smartphones really hadn’t made much of an impact in the marketplace as Nokia and Blackberry dominated the handset industry.

    Today, with smartphones from Apple and Samsung dominating, there’s no doubt the mobile phone is even more important to the typical user. So maybe Thorsten and the Blackberry team are onto something.

    Even if the smartphone does turn out to be most peoples’ main computer, it’s unlikely tablets like the iPad are going to fade away as the larger format is too handy for many uses.

    Like most things in life it’s a matter of choosing the right tool for the job and in many cases a tablet, or a Personal Computer, is the better device.

    What is clear though, is that Blackberry has to make some big bets to survive, so Thorsten’s talking big is quite understandable. You have to give him points for chutzpah.

    Disclaimer: I was given a Blackberry Z10 to trial while travelling in Tasmania. I couldn’t figure out how to use it.

    Similar posts:

  • Windows Phone 8 launch

    Windows Phone 8 launch

    This week’s launch of Window 8 Phone is part of Microsoft’s strategy to remain relevant in a world where personal computers and laptops are being left behind by smartphones and tablet computers.

    In many ways, the tablet and mobile market is an opportunity lost by Microsoft – for a decade the market had been desperate for decent tablet computers and smartphones. The Windows tablet and PDA product in the early 2000s ran on was expensive, heavy and clunky hardware that discouraged even the most determined user.

    The failure of Microsoft and their partners cost the company dearly when the iPhone and then the iPad stole the market from them. Today Apple’s iPad owns the tablet computer market while the iPhone on its own makes more money than all of Microsoft’s products put together.

    Microsoft’s response to this threat to their core business has been slow and wasn’t helped by the company Windows Vista disaster, a mis-step that broke the PC upgrade cycle.

    Fortunately Windows 7 put Microsoft’s core business back on an even keel as they contemplated their customers’ move away from the personal computer.

    The strategy now for Microsoft with Windows 8 is the “run anywhere” philosophy where a document created on your tablet computer can be accessed just as easily on your PC or on a smartphone. This relies on a cloud computing service and the same operating system running on all devices – interestingly this “hybrid cloud” idea underpins Apple’s iCloud as well.

    Being able to run documents across all Windows devices was a key part of Microsoft’s launch today with a demonstration of how Office 2013 files can be accessed.

    To get the full features of Windows Phone though you’ll have to be running Windows 8 AND Microsoft 2013 on your tablet and personal computer.

    Vendor lock-in isn’t surprising as this strategy lies at the heart of Microsoft’s business model – the problem is the market is moving away from the Windows platform and many of the devices, and people, Windows Phone users will be communicating with are using Android or Apple systems so many of the gee-whiz functions are lost.

    One of the functions displayed is Rooms, which allows like minded people to share various features. As the Microsoft media release says;

    Sometimes you want to share and chat with one group, not your entire social network. Rooms allow you to create private groups of people who have Windows Phone 8 — like your family members best friends or fantasy football league — and easily connect with just them. Chat, share calendars, shopping lists or photos in an ongoing conversation where only those invited can join in. You can share some aspects of Rooms with friends and family on other smartphones as well.

    The problem is that when your family members, best friends or fantasy football league competitors aren’t using Windows 8, the Rooms function becomes little more than a glorified shared calendar – Dropbox and Google Docs provide more features.

    For the family user Windows Phone 8 does have unique feature in allowing a children friendly profile called Kids Corner, where parents can quarantine the little ones from the main address books and features while allowing only certain apps to run. Unfortunately there’s only one Kids Corner so the little darlings will have to fight it out over the Angry Birds account.

    That Angry Birds app is the harbinger of where Microsoft’s multiple screen strategy will either succeed or die in the ditch as it will be the available applications which will determine whether customers will buy the device over the iPhone or Android competitors.

    Looking at the Samsung, HTC and Nokia phones that will be released running Windows Phone next month, all seem to be decent pieces of hardware although the Nokia 920 seems to be a hefty unit compared to the competition. Overall though all three phones seem to be decent competitors with their own strengths compared to the Android and Apple opposition.

    The success of Windows Phone will define Microsoft’s place in the post-PC world, now its up to the company and its partners to sell them.

    Similar posts:

  • Tech’s tough days

    Tech’s tough days

    Today sees another tough day for tech stocks with both Apple and Amazon missing their projected earnings which again finds Microsoft being stood up at their own party.

    For Amazon, along with the costs involved with a new range of Kindles, there’s a huge write down in their Living Social investment, another indicator that the group buying bubble has passed into history alongside tulips, 19th Century Argentinian railway bonds and South Sea investments.

    It’s worrying that while Amazon’s quarterly sales have increased by 23% over last year’s figures to $11.546 billion dollars, their cost of sales has also gone up 23% from $8.325 to $10.319 billion. This is a trend to watch closely over the next few quarters.

    Unlike Amazon, Apple still made a fat profit with income going up to $8.2 billion for the quarter, an increase of 24%. This missed many Wall Street analysts’ estimates.

    Apple’s missed earnings were put down to supply chain constraints and development costs, but what jumps out looking at the cash flow is the six billion turnaround in the company’s Accounts Receivable. One assumes this is the value of pending invoices on the new ranges of iPhones, iMacs and iPads sent out to their sales channel.

    If that’s right, Apple are looking at a big boost in their cashflow next month, although there’s few companies who would like to have five billion dollars in outstanding invoices in today’s economic climate.

    Once again though, Apple have managed to steal Microsoft’s thunder. Despite the glitz and glamour of the Windows 8 launch in New York, Microsoft’s announcement has been muted by the tech and business press’ reaction to the earnings reports.

    What is clear from all three companies though is that hand held devices – the Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle and Microsoft Surface – are going dominate the tech and financial coverage of all three companies for the rest of the year.

    Similar posts: