iPhone with 28% of U.S. Smartphone Marketshare for Q4 2007

[inkswamp]

Not "...unless they lower the price". He made a prediction, and in hindsight, it turned out to be idiotic. Maybe he was assuming that the price wouldn't drop (a monumentally stupid assumption if that was the case).

He made his "prediction" based on what was known about the iPhone at the time. At the time, it was reasonable. A lot of people were saying that same thing. The iPhone was too expensive. The real problem is that a lot of Mac fans didn't want to hear someone like him pointing out such an obvious negative about the iPhone.

As far as accusing Ballmer of stupidity for an assumption that the price wouldn't drop, well, you may as well accuse everyone of stupidity for not predicting that Apple would drop the price so soon. That was a strange and inexplicable move on Apple's part and of course nobody saw that coming, including Ballmer. Apple hadn't sold enough iPhones by that point to justify a price drop so how do you explain it? If Apple had sold the iPhone for a year at the original price and had great success, then Ballmer would have been flat-out wrong. But what he said was right given what we knew at the time, that the iPhone wasn't going to gain much traction with that price. Apple all but admitted this with that bizarre price drop that, in fact, caught everyone totally off-guard (witness the outrage of the early adopters.)

Look, I'll reiterate: I think Ballmer is a lackluster leader for MS and probably not nearly as smart as many people assume and I think he's an embarrassing leader in a lot of ways. However, raking the guy over the coals for an accurate comment about the iPhone's price just because he didn't explicitly foresee and state an early and sudden price drop is just weird.

 

[gifford]

He made his "prediction" based on what was known about the iPhone at the time. At the time, it was reasonable. A lot of people were saying that same thing. The iPhone was too expensive. The real problem is that a lot of Mac fans didn't want to hear someone like him pointing out such an obvious negative about the iPhone.

As far as accusing Ballmer of stupidity for an assumption that the price wouldn't drop, well, you may as well accuse everyone of stupidity for not predicting that Apple would drop the price so soon. That was a strange and inexplicable move on Apple's part and of course nobody saw that coming, including Ballmer. Apple hadn't sold enough iPhones by that point to justify a price drop so how do you explain it? If Apple had sold the iPhone for a year at the original price and had great success, then Ballmer would have been flat-out wrong. But what he said was right given what we knew at the time, that the iPhone wasn't going to gain much traction with that price. Apple all but admitted this with that bizarre price drop that, in fact, caught everyone totally off-guard (witness the outrage of the early adopters.)

Look, I'll reiterate: I think Ballmer is a lackluster leader for MS and probably not nearly as smart as many people assume and I think he's an embarrassing leader in a lot of ways. However, raking the guy over the coals for an accurate comment about the iPhone's price just because he didn't explicitly foresee and state an early and sudden price drop is just weird.

One would hope balmer did know the device would drop in price, otherwise he really is 'megadumb'.
I expect he was just fishing for negative stuff to say about the competition as most heads of companies do when interviewed. He's not gonna exactly say "its great buy it"

 

[BongoBanger]

As far as those market share reports go, who cares. They are talking about the past and perhaps the immediate present. The future is unwritten. Apple could go nonproprietary, Microsoft could actually make a superior product, Nokia could trip, and someone in a garage could still surprise us all. As for me, I don't really care about market share beyond the need to give me a better experience with these tools.

And that's the problem. If we could all predict how the bloody markets would go we'd all be millionaires!

 

[diamond.g]

I have a long history of backing technology that the majority initially thought was stupid or went against traditional market dynamics. And I'm sure I will be proved correct again.

You backed HD DVD!!!!

 

[winterspan]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A93 Safari/419.3)

They were not saying Palm and Windows Mobile Devices combined. They were talking about all of the devices that use Windows Mobile combined make up 21%. So the comparison was 28% vs. 21%, stating that the iPhone is ahead. I initially thought the same thing.

You two are missing the fact that PALM IS A WINDOWS MOBILE DEVICE PRODUCER. I assume the 21% includes Palm as well. Or the analyst is an idiot for not doing so... sorry Im too lazy to actually loook at the article.

 

[diamond.g]

From the little I've seen of Windows mobile, it looks like a bad fork from some distant version of Windows. I'd appreciate it if some developer who has coded for both could pipe up here to describe their porting experience between the two. We have yet to see how development will actually work between the big cat version of OS X and the smaller i-devices of OS X.

Windows Mobile is based on XP, the Vista based version is supposed to be version 7. Microsoft claims they realize that Consumers are put off by the OS. Their initial concern was business folks (big suprise ). There was a post earlier that talked about WM7 (calling it a rip off of the iPhone OS) which may be true, but the main insider article was interesting.

You would make a great politician Syrus.


I wasnt aware xbox, zune ran windows? on ibm chips? Not out the box, so im gonna discount those.

Getting back to the point (as your numbers often seem to meander from the point in question), we are talking about NEW devices.

so discount xp
we can keep zune in for fun if you like
we should really be comparing the following numbers...

Vista - ~100 million sold
Zune - at least 1 million sold
Windows Mobile - [cant find any total sales] Sold 11 million in 2007, expects 20 million in 2008

Macs - 50 [?] million sold
iPod - 140 million sold
iPhone - 4 million sold
Apple TV - 1 million sold [apple expected this many by Dec 07]

though there is still legacy sales in mac AND vista which skew from the original talking point. vista most definitely did not sell 100mil on new machines.

Xbox and the 360 both run a stripped down Windows kernel, just like how the iPhone runs a stripped down OS X kernel. You may want to revise your iPod numbers, there isn't 140 million OS X using iPods. I am not sure about the Zune though, I haven't seen or heard anything that points to it running a Windows kernel.

 

[gifford]

Windows Mobile is based on XP, the Vista based version is supposed to be version 7. Microsoft claims they realize that Consumers are put off by the OS. Their initial concern was business folks (big suprise ). There was a post earlier that talked about WM7 (calling it a rip off of the iPhone OS) which may be true, but the main insider article was interesting.

Xbox and the 360 both run a stripped down Windows kernel, just like how the iPhone runs a stripped down OS X kernel. You may want to revise your iPod numbers, there isn't 140 million OS X using iPods. I am not sure about the Zune though, I haven't seen or heard anything that points to it running a Windows kernel.

I was trying to suggest (as you say) those numbers are useless to the argument. i did not originally post them.

 

[tarant24a]

Ballmer was wrong

Funny....Steve Ballmer was quoted last May saying that the iphone would never gain a significant share of the smartphone market

 

[diamond.g]

I was trying to suggest (as you say) those numbers are useless to the argument. i did not originally post them.

Ah, fair enough.

 

[Kar98]

Windows Mobile is based on XP

No, it's not. It's based on Windows CE, currently 6.0, and it doesn't have anything to do with XP, which is based on Windows NT.

 

[goosnarrggh]

You would make a great politician Syrus.


I wasnt aware xbox, zune ran windows? on ibm chips? Not out the box, so im gonna discount those.

Getting back to the point (as your numbers often seem to meander from the point in question), we are talking about NEW devices.

so discount xp
we can keep zune in for fun if you like
we should really be comparing the following numbers...

Vista - ~100 million sold
Zune - at least 1 million sold
Windows Mobile - [cant find any total sales] Sold 11 million in 2007, expects 20 million in 2008

Macs - 50 [?] million sold
iPod - 140 million sold
iPhone - 4 million sold
Apple TV - 1 million sold [apple expected this many by Dec 07]

though there is still legacy sales in mac AND vista which skew from the original talking point. vista most definitely did not sell 100mil on new machines.



ahh im glad you mentioned the 1 billion mark, as that is how many phones are sold EVERY YEAR! Also you are talking historic data still.




We shall see. I have set a countdown that will warn me to check the stats again in 2 years time(though i expect most significant changes in the third/forth year), if your still on this forum, til then..

If we discount XP, then we must discount the entire installed base of Macs running pre-Leopard OS X.

You should also throw away all the iPods that are not iPod Touch - they all ran (and still do run - remember the Classic and 3rd generation Nano are still shipping) a proprietary 3rd party kernel with no relation to OS X whatsoever.

All generations of Xboxen do run Windows kernels - out of the box, every time you pop in a game. But to be fair, the original Xbox is no longer shipping, so it shouldn't be counted.

The Zune runs the Windows CE kernel - out of the box (the same kernel as is used in Windows Mobile), but with a single-purpose user interface.

 

[gifford]

And that's the problem. If we could all predict how the bloody markets would go we'd all be millionaires!

But you make it sound like its impossible to predicts the markets. Thousands of people are successful at doing just that every day. And many are millionaires from it.
Prediction is a fine art, but not impossible.
If a person knows all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that surrounds a missing piece, it is possible to predict it's exact shape and size without ever seeing it.
Most people are too involved with one subject matter to see the bigger picture, akin to knowing only one or two sides of a missing puzzle piece.

 

[cornercuttin]

iPhone looks like its here to stay... Too bad for Windows Mobile. They had a huge head start and everything. Now they just got left in the dust. Like babies.

i will never understand how people can be competitive about products that they don't even design, created by companies they don't work for. why would anyone care if Windows Mobile was doing good or bad? in fact, competition keeps prices low. just because you own an Apple product, that doesn't make you a part of anything. it just makes you a consumer. i own an iPhone, and I love it, but i'm not competing in any way with the guy in the cubicle next to me who has a Windows mobile phone. i like his phone too. his network is faster, and he can play flash games on it, which I cannot do. porn is a lot easier to look at on his too....

how people aren't just indifferent to this kind of information, i will never understand. unless you work for Apple, you are writing Apps to sell on the iPhone, or you have a large amount of stock from Apple, you shouldn't care.

 

[gifford]

If we discount XP, then we must discount the entire installed base of Macs running pre-Leopard OS X.

You should also throw away all the iPods that are not iPod Touch - they all ran (and still do run - remember the Classic and 3rd generation Nano are still shipping) a proprietary 3rd party kernel with no relation to OS X whatsoever.

All generations of Xboxen do run Windows kernels - out of the box, every time you pop in a game. But to be fair, the original Xbox is no longer shipping, so it shouldn't be counted.

The Zune runs the Windows CE kernel - out of the box (the same kernel as is used in Windows Mobile), but with a single-purpose user interface.

i tell ya what, can we just throw out the whole stats cos i didnt put them up originally!!!!!!!! my original point was for new devices and new devices alone.

Ask Syrus28 about it not me

 

[BongoBanger]

But you make it sound like its impossible to predicts the markets. Thousands of people are successful at doing just that every day. And many are millionaires from it.

I know. I'm an Information Manager for a company that makes billions trading and have a pretty good stock portfolio myself. However, not everyone is au fait with the markets and not even the best players get it right all the time however, more to the point, based on research this looks like a bad gamble.

Prediction is a fine art, but not impossible.

Yup.

If a person knows all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that surrounds a missing piece, it is possible to predict it's exact shape and size without ever seeing it.

I know. It's part of what I do.

Most people are too involved with one subject matter to see the bigger picture, akin to knowing only one or two sides of a missing puzzle piece.

But in my job I'm not. I just can't see where Apple will get the leverage at the moment to optimise a synergised OS because of its current market strategy. Sure, if they change it then fine, but that exposes them to other risks - that of losing their 'prestige' tag for one.

 

[diamond.g]

No, it's not. It's based on Windows CE, currently 6.0, and it doesn't have anything to do with XP, which is based on Windows NT.

Fair enough.

 

[gifford]

I know. I'm an Information Manager for a company that makes billions trading and have a pretty good stock portfolio myself. However, not everyone is au fait with the markets and not even the best players get it right all the time however.......

Then you know what im talking about, though it appeared in your post that you thought prediction was hocus pocus.
I have been advising people to buy AAPL since they were considering Be or NEXT as the replacement OS. Infact I'm quite happy to go on record and suggest today is a good day also.
Apple have been holding a golden ticket since the day they bought NEXT, their strategy is remarkably simple, yet very few seem to grasp it, including the majority of multi billion dollar companies.
One particular CEO I know (naming no names) of one of the biggest and well known electronics companies, is a lovely man, but it stuck me that he made it to where he was through confidence and brute force alone. A genius this does not make. Most corporate cultures have top brass that are assigned on this survival of the fittest mentality. Hence the lack of vision evident in the majority of boardrooms.
You only have to look at some of the laughable mistakes billion dollar companies make to realize money cant buy common sense.
The philosophy that gave me great confidence in the company(apple) then , still exists today. A large part of that philosophy revolves around open source, and open standards, but im not gonna get into that now as my RSI will be fully agrivated by the time i have finished writing what can be given away free will be given away free, those who can exist in this environment will be winners, but fight it and fail. Some companies are better positioned to survive than others.
Apple have an advantage over everyone, creativity, a loyal user base, cool factor, expertise, an infrastructure that only time can build, a grasp of good UI, and a polished unix OS that nobody can recreate in a hurry no matter how many billions X company wants to throw.

 

[blairwillis]

That's impressive. I think we'll continue to see expanding growth in the smartphone % because many, many people I've talked to are just waiting for existing contracts to expire before switching to the iPhone/AT&T. Not that my informal poll indicates a nationwide trend, but I do talk to lots of people about the iPhone.

 

[gifford]

You backed HD DVD!!!!

Haha! No, I was blessed with the common sense to realize neither were worth backing. Physical formats died with the dinosaurs.

 

[Lord Sam]

Go Apple!

 

[diamond.g]

Haha! No, I was blessed with the common sense to realize neither were worth backing. Physical formats died with the dinosaurs.

Hmm, I take it you don't have a nice home theater (or appreciate high quality content)? If you do you should take a look at the Planet Earth series (in HD). IMO only thing better is actually being there.

And no the 18mbps mpeg 2 crap they show on cable doesn't count.

 

[gifford]

Hmm, I take it you don't have a nice home theater (or appreciate high quality content)? If you do you should take a look at the Planet Earth series (in HD). IMO only thing better is actually being there.

And no the 18mbps mpeg 2 crap they show on cable doesn't count.

I can see the hairs on the persons chin of whomever happens to be in focus, it really makes no odds to me if I'm watching HD or not.
Anyhow, physical media has many disadvantages and I would trade them in for convenience anyday.
It does not take a rocket scientist nor nostradamus to realize the future of content distribution is online.
HD online distribution will be common place within a couple of years, and blue ray will be the shortest lived format (of the 'winners')in the history data storage, even DAT, betamax and videodisk will have had longer lifespans!

 

[mrxak]

Okay, I admit I was wrong, the iPhone was actually something people wanted. I'm curious though, how much has the smartphone market actually grown though? Is it old smartphone people buying iPhones, or new people buying them? If it's the latter, then maybe the iPhone has 100% of the iPhone marketshare and a lot less of the smartphone marketshare, if that makes any sense.

 

[SheriffParker]

how people aren't just indifferent to this kind of information, i will never understand. unless you work for Apple, you are writing Apps to sell on the iPhone, or you have a large amount of stock from Apple, you shouldn't care.

Well I really don't care that much. I post here for fun and enjoyment. I like Apple products. I'd like to see them do well in the future. That's all.

 

[SiliconAddict]

Apple should get into politics. No doubt 28% is a spun number of some form or another.