Whenever I see punditry about web versus app, or worse, web versus mobile, I see a graph in my mind’s eye. It is inspired by disruption theory, but I’m not a deep student of Christensen’s work so please don’t read his implicit support into anything I’m writing here. Skipping to the punchline, here’s that graph. […]

I’ve seen and heard a lot of talk about Apple’s new M7 motion co-processor and iBeacon feature after the iPhone announcement earlier this week, most of it pointing out that these features lay some of the foundation for indoor mapping. But I haven’t seen anything explaining exactly why they have this significance. It has been […]

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 […]