Slashdot Mirror
Dvorak to Apple - Stop The iPhone
eldavojohn writes "John Dvorak is advising Apple to cease all efforts on the iPhone, citing the mobile handset business as a 'buzz saw waiting to chop up newbies.' With Apple's image as a 'hot company that can do no wrong' on the line, Dvorak warns that the extremely fad-prone marketplace for cell phones will quickly turn the 'hot' iPhone passe'. Unless the company has several new models in the pipeline to release after the original offering, he says, they're likely to fail. 'If it's smart it will call the iPhone a "reference design" and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else's marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.'"
The phone has GPS. The GPS continually updates every minute and stores in cache on phone. Every so many hours, its uploaded to your home account so you can review where you were the days before. It also has a 1 touch blog. You can then record voice/text/pictures/video to your site and it will be formatted nicely. You can let family members or friends view this website. It would be a living diary for you, and would take no effort. Just 1 button and all the complex web work is done automatically. Hey and if someone wants to implement this, maybe you can hire me :)
God spoke to me.
The cell phone market is filled with phones that are difficult to use, unstable, and generally crap.
I have a Motorola Q and it SUCKS. Sure, it hooks up to exchange, and it is nice and small, but battery life sucks, voice recognition sucks, and it crashes more than Eddie Griffin driving an Enzo.
I can't tell you how many times I've looked at phone interfaces from LG, Samsung, Motorola and Nokia and thought the designers were all on crack.
Apple NEEDS to show the world how to make a phone. God help us if they don't.
-ted
Ya know, like how the iPod was going to destroy the prestine image of Apple back in 2001? What a fucking idiot this guy always seems to be. Sure the iPhone isn't going to break any records out of the gate, but its something to grow on. It's the way things have to work: the first adopters are always going to be techies, who want the most features possible... this subsidizes the marketing of lower-end models which target the mainstream consumer. It's a good business strategy when trying to bring out a new type of gadget.
The Zune failed because it tried to copy something that was already on the market, but started with the high end. The opposite would have been better, here, they should have started with really low-end models and worked their way up, because Microsoft wasn't really aiming to establish a new kind of device. The iPhone, on the other hand, is really pushing to try and bring a fairly unique kind of device into the mainstream market place, so they have to start at the top.
There's a reason Dvorak never gets hired for consulting work, he has no idea what goes into a good business strategy. I don't know why we even post his fluff on here any more. I say slashdot just ignore him from now on, and he'll eventually go away.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Excerpts:
While a 2% share of the entire world's PCs wouldn't suggest much of a reason to target Macs for software development, having 8% of the active US installed base certainly does.
Since more than half of all PCs are used in business, Apple owns an even larger portion of the consumer market's installed base, where Apple choses to compete. Pulling out business PCs, Apple's share of the consumer PC installed base is above 15%, which correlates with the software available for the Mac.
In education, Apple has a 23% share of all new sales in the US, and around 15% in Europe. (Walk around a college campus and tell me how many Macs you see. Now realize that Macs are probably going to be their platform of choice going forward.)
NPD just reported figures that report Apple took 10% of January's billion dollar laptop sales in the retail channels it monitors; recall that NPD only reports on big box retailers, not Apple Stores or any online sales.
In the final quarter of 2007, Apple earned $7.1 billion in revenue, compared to Microsoft's $12.5 billion in total revenue. Yes, that's right, Apple brought in more than half as much money as Microsoft, despite Windows owning 98% of the PC market.
Even stripping Apple of its iPod revenues, which PC pundits love to do, the company still earned $4.4 billion on its Macintosh business, over a third as much Microsoft brought in from its entire Windows, Office, and server operations combined. Apple's 2% of the PC market doesn't seem so small anymore.
Of course, Microsoft actually lost a lot of money on all of its consumer electronics products, so looking at profits, Apple earned $1 billion compared to Microsoft's total $3.4 billion in profit.
Yeah, Apple's a non-payer alright...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
He's wrong on occasion - but that doesn't mean he's ALWAYS wrong. I happen to agree with him here, although I don't think that it will ruin Apple or anything. I think they will release the iPhone, it will be a big seller for a little while and a status symbol (kinda like the $600 razr phone, which is now $50 or free with a plan.) But, the margins are very slim, the phone is kinda big and fragile in comparison to a flip-phone (big screen, like the PSP.. with a very shiny surface) and expensive as all hell. In the long term, I don't see Apple producing too many phones.
..xyz." Touch screen on a portable phone is novel, but not necessary in any way. The device is still locked down to all hell.
To top it all off, they aren't really introducing anything new that would be a "even if they fail, at least they brought us
I wish them luck, and I think they're going to need it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -