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by Bertie

How do you explain this? II

October 5, 2012 in Media, tablets

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WIth the announcement of the iPhone5 I noted Tim Cooks’s remark that whereas iPad had 68% marketshare 91% of tablet internet traffic was accounted for by iPad (http://blogs.fin24.com/bertieduplessis/2012/09/13/how-do-you-explain-this/).

Now the figures make even less sense. I received a report from Business Insider earlier the week (a market research firm focusing on the mobile industry – I am subscribed to their reports) that shows iPad account for 98% of tablet internet traffic!!

On the subject of mobile, BI report on a WSJ article (that I missed) on advertising on the mobile devices. The old display ads don’t work. What works?

  • Big, beautiful ads if used sparingly
  • Works: Useful or fun ads
  • Some of the ingredients to success include ads that play on the unique properties of mobile gadgets, including location, or
  • ads disguised as a game, or
  • coupon or
  • information that consumers want.

Here is the adspend across platforms:

 

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by Bertie

How do you explain this?

September 13, 2012 in tablets

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Perhaps you can help Tim Cook, Apple CEO. He can’t explain this, most astounding fact, about the iPad from yesterday’s presentation at the launch of the new iPhone, the iPhone5.

iPad in fact upped its market share in the past year from a market share of 62% to a 68% – and this despite the launch of numerous competitors.

Now, here is the astounding fact that TIm Cook finds difficult to explain:  If you look at internet usage, iPad account for 91% of internet traffic.  ” So,”  and this is what Cook is asking, what are users doing with the other tablets?

What is happening,  on iPad, according to Cook,  is that it is increasingly being used for specialised business applications.

Mobility is truly coming to the workplace.

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by Bertie

Too many cooks?

July 20, 2012 in Innovation

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The same story again and again…

They invent and others run with the idea and make money.

The latest is Nokia. They had it in the late 90s, a tablet, just like iPad and they had a smart phone to go with it. Seven years before iPhone they had a concept touch screen phone with a single home button at the bottom. And yet… Only if… “Of all the words the saddest…”   All revealed by Frank Nuove then Nokia’s chief designer in an interview with WSJ yesterday.

Like Kodak, like Xerox (mouse and GUI)…

And everybody talks about how important innovation is. Methinks they spend millions on invention, not innovation. The CEOs and executives all know the text book definition of innovation: “Invention that becomes commercialized.”  Seems they all pay lip service to the definition and think no further than invention.  Invention alone won’t bring you anywhere. Why this talk, talk, talk, of innovation and when push comes to shove there is no will to commercialize your own inventions?

Maybe we should stop talking of innovation – quite clearly there are enough inventions lying around and begin focusing on bringing to market and making money from what there is.

Or does the problem go deeper? Perhaps our obsession with consultative leadership and management leads to ” too many cooks spoil the broth.” Perhaps you do need strong-willed leaders like Jobs – even tough thoroughly unpleasant at times – to override corporate fiefdoms. Perhaps, just perhaps we have sunk into politically correct corporate thinking and forgetting that the real world is not such a kind democratic, touchy feel place as gurus would want us to believe.

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by Bertie

Why some are doomed to dip their feet in bloody waters

July 3, 2012 in tablets, User experience

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Chris commented to the previous post that whenever there is a company such as Apple with a huge mark-up on manufacturing costs, there will be a frenzy of low (er) cost manufacturers competing downstream.

Definitely so!

But this is not the entire picture. Simply looking at the markup on manufacturing is only a part of the picture.  Two questions demand an answer:

  1. Why are people willing to pay the mark-up?
  2. What enabled say Apple to be in a position to charge the mark-up?

Let’s begin with #2:  

Apple invested for decades in the Apple brand – which by the way is not just a pretty skin, it is an Apple world view applied consistently over time to all aspects of design and manufacturing. Core to the Apple world view is a relentless focus on user experience. None of these is reflected in “manufacturing price”, yet all of these had to be established and executed with almost pathological discipline to get to the point of manufacturing. Incorporate this in the price and the Apple markup is not nearly as outrageous.

Which goes to answer:

Question #1

People are willing to pay for this mark-up because of a superior user experience. And don’t come with the easy interjection about a boosted user ego. Sure, that is part of the mix. But much more important is the fact that the user feels valued because their experience was paramount in the design.

Personally I don’t feel ripped off by iPad or iPhone prices, because I know how difficult, energy sapping the branding process is when it delivers real value and not merely a pretty skin.

It is not so much that the other providers such as Samsung, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are willing to take a thinner margin, seeing wide open low cost spaces opening up, it is that they are forced into this position because they cannot catch up with decades of focus on consumer experience and relentlessly, pathologically  relentlessly focus on designing from the point of view of the user.

I am often involved in project where I must help my client to see the world from the point of view of the end user. Not an easy job! Full marks to Apple who initiate it all on their own and keep at it.

Lesson if you want the ” fat,”  ” outrageous”  margin on your products, you better now begin to focus on your branding, branding with a real value proposition, and then not any value proposition at that, but user experience!  Maybe in a decade you will be able to charge the outrageous markup!

 

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