For more than a decade, legions of Apple fans have been wondering how it is possible that people will choose a Windows PC over a Mac. After all, user experience is critical, right? And there is no question, at least in the mind of a Mac user like me, that Apple’s neatly integrated hardware+software experience [...]

Idiocy in the tech press is particularly acute recently as writers pounce on the news that Samsung now has triple Apple’s share of the smartphone market in China. Let’s break this down. In one corner, we have Samsung, which has been manufacturing and distributing phones for decades. It has relationships with all the mobile operators [...]

It feels a bit unfair to pick on one author for mistakes that so many technology writers are making all the time, but this particular article in Forbes is such a great example of the problem that it is impossible for me to resist. The gist of the article is that Apple hardware is falling [...]

The world is crying out for decent post-PC smart devices. In response the industry is producing terrible products that would never see light of day in any other product category. How do we know the world is crying out for decent products? The iPad. In 15 months the iPad was making more money for Apple [...]

On the right is a selection of Liquorice Allsorts, a product where choice is a key feature. Everyone has their favorite, but there is something wonderful about finding it amongst the others. People share a bag of Liquorice Allsorts, and different people have different favorites. The variety keeps things interesting and leads to the consumption [...]

Very few of Apple’s product introductions are breakthroughs from a pure technology standpoint. Anyone working in Microsoft, Google, Nokia or any one of a dozen other technology companies had seen everything in the first iPhone before Steve unveiled it. What they hadn’t seen before was a user experience that brought it all together in such [...]

IDC released Q1 global smartphone market share numbers yesterday. Here they are, with two additional columns that I think are useful. The first column I’ve added just shows the absolute Q1 year-on-year unit growth so you don’t have to do the math in your head. The second shows these as a percentage of overall growth [...]

I’ve done the MBA thing, I’ve worked in the strategy team of a large software company and I’ve done my share of theorizing and plotting and moving the pieces around the big war chart. So I’m aware of strategery and moats and network effects. That sort of analysis is interesting and worthwhile, but sometimes when [...]

In a future where every 3rd party thing you do on your phone is done using some sort of web-based UI, phones are only differentiated by (in no particular order): Industrial design Battery life Performance of web apps on the device Quality of UX for essential built in functions (e.g. voice calling) Price That is, [...]

This analysis by Henry Blodget on Business Insider makes the classic (repeated ad-nauseum) mistake of putting Apple in a race they’re not in. Apple does not make a third party OS platform for phones. It makes phones and it makes an application platform for developers. What he is implicitly doing is using OS footprint as a [...]