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Netgear CEO Says Jobs's Ego Will Bite Apple
AcidAUS writes "The global chairman and CEO of home networking giant Netgear has launched into a scathing attack on Apple and its founder Steve Jobs, criticising Jobs's 'ego' and Apple's closed up products. At a lunch in Sydney today, Patrick Lo said Apple's success was centred on closed and proprietary products that would soon be overtaken by open platforms like Google's Android."
Like a couple of decades ago, where Microsoft and IBM boomed into the market? Seems history does repeat itself.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
There's nothing like kicking a man when he's down is there. Seriously, why complain about his influence just when he's left to "focus on his health"?
JOBS vision to create "cool" Macs instead of the old beige/bland Macs/MP3s, basically saved Apple from the same fate that hit Atari and Commodore. Plus he had the vision to create the sleek, easy-to-use iPod.
Else we'd all be talking about the bankrupt former company called Apple, instead of today's thriving near-number 1 company. Jobs is still leading the company in the right direction and giving it that cool factor which appeals to consumers.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
I don't usually respond to AC's... but Mac market share is not increasing. MacBook market share is a bit, but not at any sort of alarming rate, and the iPhone is barely big enough to be considered a contender for top spot and isn't moving upwards.
Netgear's stock has increased in price by 100% since it went public. Apple's stock, over the same time period, has increased in price by over 3100%.
Now stock price isn't everything, but it is to these people...
Actually, Apple's currently the third-place player in the smartphone market, after Google and Symbian. (Apple's hardly going to fail in that business, though. Even six months ago they were making about half of the money in the entire mobile phone market.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I don't care much for Apple or it's products for exactly the reasons stated in TFA. The closed nature of the offerings usually locks me out of doing something I considered basic, that I wanted to do. Little or no reprieve from this is often offered. It's Apple's way, or the highway.
But the fact is, this attitude has been nothing but good for them from a business standpoint. Most consumers don't need or WANT options that they consider complex or confusing. Time and again it has been proven through sales that people want simple. People want 1 click, 1 button, no chance of screwing up. When people are more confident with their product right out of the box, they like it more. And Apple is great at giving people something they feel comfortable using the moment they turn it on.
Why would Apple change this? It feels like sour grapes to me. Developers have a hard time, but consumers are happy. In the end, Apple cares more about it's customers than it's partners, which is the right choice to make from a business standpoint. The only way Patrick Lo is going to be proven right, is if people stop buying Apple products. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Yes, iOS-based devices will be overtaken (in terms of sales, and number of users) by Android. That seems pretty clear now, and the Android folks should be proud of their achievements.
But Apple will continue "succeeding", in terms of making bucketloads of money. Consider the computer segment - Apple occupy a small, significant niche in the market, and make a healthy profit from it. I think that's where their iOS devices are headed. People who want Apple products will always have them, and everyone else gets to choose their OS and hardware.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
I'm sure that Verizon thing won't change the iPhone's market share at all...
back in the 1980's?
i like apple, but like a lot of companies they got lucky and rode the gadget wave of the last decade as PC growth stopped. it was John Rubenstein who made the ipod, not steve jobs.
wintel rode the PC wave as people wanted freedom from IBM
Apple did the same thing as people started doing more computing away from PC's
in a few years a new tech cycle will start and apple may get left behind like MS
In the practical sense, I don't see why Android is considered more "open" than iOS. I realize more of the OS components for Android are fully open source. However, developers are still subject to the rules of the Android store. The phone manufacturers are carriers still have the final say on which features of the OS are actually shipped intact. Users still have to jailbreak Android phones to side-step these artificial limitations. Maybe I'm missing some critical bit of information -- and if so, I'd love to be corrected -- but I don't see much of a difference between the "openness" of the two platforms when it comes to practical usage.
This guy from netgear talks but he should remember that this is Steve's invention let him do what he wants with it. So you have two choices, one that is closed and one that is open tell this guy to buy the one he wants to buy. I've thought about the smartphone market and I can't convince myself anyone else would have butchered the thing from the beginning. Mind you I realize Apple did not invent the smartphone or pioneer it but he did do a great job of it while most others had their heads up their asses. Something in my gut tells me without Jobs kick starting this market the way he did we would have been stuck with programs that wouldn't of even loaded, some nasty monochrome screen and a brutal 16MHz chip powering the whole thing. What Jobs did do is make a consumer expect something out of their device and their purchase, they expect the developer to be in some way responsible for their programming, they expect some sort of fluid UI, they expect the device to do what is claimed rather than reliving 3gp type video and brutal audio. He might not stay the king but he has made confidence in a product and now a market that did not exist before him and for that at least I have to say thanks for bringing us this far.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
From the article:
"Ultimately a closed system just can't go that far ... If they continue to close it and let Android continue to creep up then it's pretty difficult as I see it."
Lo said the industry had "seen this movie play several times", pointing to the Betamax vs. VHS video format war, Mac vs. Windows and various proprietary networking protocols that at one stage tried to compete with the now dominant TCP/IP.
In each of the above cases, the more open platforms won more market share. However, Apple has bucked this trend so far with its closed ecosystems for the iPhone and iPad.
"Right now the closed platform has been successful for Apple because they've been so far ahead as thought leaders because of Steve Jobs," said Lo.
"Eventually they've got to find a way to open up iTunes without giving too much away on their revenue generation model."
The author is positing that the closed model you are so impressed with needs to change if they want to survive Android. Unfortunately, Jobs' ego will not allow this and they'll most likely end up in the same realm as Microsoft -- financially great but viewed as a 'has been' and opportunist by the community.
My work here is dung.
Lets take a look
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL
Market Cap: 309.64B
P/E (ttm): 18.75
EPS (ttm): 17.92
vs
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=NTGR
Market Cap: 1.22B
P/E (ttm): 26.91
EPS (ttm): 1.27
Mr jobs is obviously doing "SOMETHING" right ..
And by the looks of the numbers , mr netgear should worry about his own house , before he starts looking into others.
Heard the same thing about iPods vs. MP3 Players, Macs vs. PC's, and before that about Apple II's vs. CPM. There was a five year stretch where Apple wasn't doing so hot, but it turned out this was because they weren't being proprietary enough... once Steve brought out the iMac, nuked the clones and axed compatibility with obsolete or inefficient standards, they've been selling exceptionally well, and delivering a much thicker profit margin than competing profits.
That's not arrogance, that's good business sense.
It'll be the economy. The US is poised by end of year to have the same debt:GDP ratio that Greece had when catastrophe struck there. The US is teetering on the edge of another great depression because our debt levels have reached a point where they're choking both the public and private sectors.
Apple does not make products that will fare well in a very bad economy. The iPhone, for example, forces the user to pay a king's ransom for a new battery every two years or so or buy a new one. Apple doesn't make decent computers which can compete in the low end market (where many users will be forced to go by the economy); their idea of "low end" is a $900-$1000 laptop, not a $400-$600 laptop.
Apple won't be alone in this area. I think Oracle will end up getting hurt even worse as companies that used to throw expensive enterprise apps at every problem have to choose between payroll and expenses like using Oracle for a database that's barely more than a bit bucket. The US IT industry as a whole will get humbled.
Michael Dell (10/6/1997): ""What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives. [http://news.cnet.com/Dell-Apple-should-close-shop/2100-1001_3-203937.html#ixzz1CccaByog]
And just because it is too easy, another one from the oracle of all that is IT, Dell. This time from CEO Kevin Rollins (1/17/2005):
"It is interesting: the iPod has been out for three years and it is only this past year [2004] it [has] become a raging success. Well those things that become fads rage and then they drop off. When I was growing up there was a product made by Sony called the Sony Walkman – a rage, everyone had to have one. Well you don't hear about the Walkman anymore. I believe that one product wonders come and go. You have to have sustainable business models, sustainable strategy."
So, now the venerable Netgear, whose footsteps make all in the industry tremble, has announced the demise of Apple. Projecting just a tad, perhaps? :)
They have a virtual monopoly on the MP3 player market.
1) No they don't.
2) Lot's of computer companies have had "virtual monopolies" in the past: wordperfect, ashton tate, lotus, netscape, and novell; to name a few. Where are they now?
Smartphone makers are fighting to the death for the scraps the iPhone leaves behind
Hardly. Adroid sales are roughly equal to iPhone sales.
Just the Apple name is good enough to sell anything
Dead wrong. Apple has had lot's of failures in their history.
Even desktop computing is swinging Apple's way with more people moving to Macs.
Who are you kidding? Windows absolutely dominates desktop computing, and will do so for the foreseeable future.
So, regardless of Jobs, there is realistically no way Apple can ever fail as a company.
I think that's overstating the case. Apple is in no danger in the foreseeable future, for exactly the reasons you present, but "never" is a long time. If they started to really screw up (ala, the Sculley years) they'd have 5, maybe 10 year of padding before it started to show. They could easily be on the verge of bankruptcy again in 10-12 years if the right combination of events occurred. Note that I'm not saying it will happen, or even that it's likely to happen, but Apple is no more immune to screw ups than any other company.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
This is true... between from about 3 to 6 years ago. These days, everything has "MP3 players" in them. Every smart phone and quite a few not-so-smart phones too. Hell, even USB memory devices are also MP3 players as well.
Apple relegated itself to niche markets at every turn. The PC market was overtaken by business machines made by IBM and then by clone makers. Did it mean Apple died? No. They maintained their fan base just as they always have. If Steve Jobs were a "greedy bastard" he would have and could have beat them all by making machines and software that are more enterprise friendly and enterprise ready. He didn't and he won't it seems. He sees something better in the way he does things now, but more people reject Apple and its projects than crave them. They are certainly no longer out of the price range of most people. No... it's partly because of that pesky "critical mass" monster that Microsoft created... partly because Apple doesn't care to compete in that market.
One thing I am pretty certain of is that once Jobs is gone, Apple will change in a drastic way. Another thing I am pretty certain of is that Jobs has already lived longer than I expected him to. I expect him to kick the bit-bucket any time now. I don't think we will have to wait long to see what Apple will become next.
Not on a global scale. It's about as important as Germany getting the iPhone in the grand scheme: quantitatively significant, but not qualitatively important.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The cover image is great [If you can't see it, it's of the Netgear CEO holding a Netgear branded phone that I would guess was won in a claw-machine game.]
Steve Lo wishes he had the industry influence (control) Steve Jobs has. He doesn't. Maybe this is why: 'Asked whether he was concerned about reports that the world would run out of internet address within weeks, Lo compared the issue to the shift from 2G networks to 3G networks and beyond. "It's disruptive, but we love it - everybody has to buy something new," he said.'
Actually, you wouldn't have made money betting against Jobs, just against Apple. To my knowledge Jobs has only ever been directly involved in one company that didn't pretty much make money hand over fist the entire time he was with them. That company was NeXT, and while it was never a huge commercial success in it's own right, it paved the way for Jobs' return to Apple and for all intents and purposes designed what would become OSX. So you couldn't exactly call it a failure either. Apple has stumbled a few times under Jobs' direct leadership (the Lisa comes to mind), but it's never had any disastrous failures while he was at the helm.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Actually they're not. AppleTV (an iAnything if ever there was one) has been pretty much DOA until recently - Xserve was killed due to lack of sales - (you'd think the corporate fanboys in Hollywood and New York would have lapped those up?!)
How is this still debated? Not everything Apple touches turns to gold. Your meme is defective.
Lo said: "Steve Jobs doesn't give me a minute!"
Call the waaaaahmbulance.
"What's the reason for him to trash Flash? There's no reason other than ego," he said.
If he really can't understand the big deal with Flash -- which has been discussed to death -- I don't think he has either the technical background or business acumen to understand why Apple has made their decision.
Maybe instead of worrying about other companies he could focus on his own product support -- I own a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo and have found it underpowered... can't even stream multiple streams at once. Heaven help you if you try to use the included FireFly software while you're copying a large file to the NAS... it just can't handle it. It's best described as a NAS for a single computer... unless you actually want to do 2 things at once with it.
NetGear products are cheap to mid-range products and a bit more attention to detail would help differentiate them. Netgear needs someone to fixate on getting it right rather than getting it out the door.
The prototype didn't do so well, but there are an awful lot of the production model around. All those silver notebooks with glowing apples on the cover.
Yeah, it's now OS X.
The hardware is gone, but the software lives on in a highly capable OS.
I don't usually respond to AC's... but Mac market share is not increasing..
Sales of Macs have increased faster than sales of PC's for several years in a row. That means that Apple's market-share is increasing.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I don't usually respond to AC's... but Mac market share is not increasing.
Ironic that your post has the factual correctness of an AC. Try to find a quarter when the Mac market share was NOT increasing greater than the overall computer market (ie increasing relative to the market)
http://www.9to5mac.com/30393/apple-breaks-through-10-us-marketshare-for-the-first-time-since-the-early-90s
I don't have a single Netgear item in my house that still functions, everything I've bought from them either fails to meet my expectations and is returned, or dies shortly after the warranty expires. I have many Apple products that went to the "still works great but I got a newer one" bin. You can complain about "closed" being a reason not to buy Apple products, but I think "It's a POS that will fail quickly" as the main reason I'm not buying Netgear.
I don't care much for Apple or it's products for exactly the reasons stated in TFA. The closed nature of the offerings usually locks me out of doing something I considered basic, that I wanted to do.
I don't see this point as correct.
For the Mac platform, it's certainly not correct. I bought an OS X system a while ago exactly because it did allow me to do more advanced things easily, because the UNIX core was built in. It also ships to this day with X11 support!!
For iOS, Apple ships by default in a way that is simpler for most people to understand and use. But there too you have plenty of choice for advanced options; when jailbroken, no platform is as hackable as iOS - primarily because of the easy injection of custom code into applications written in ObjectiveC. Android hasn't really appealed to me not because the development frameworks are not quite as advanced as OS X, but also because I can modify any application in the system rather than having to write an application from scratch to do something I want.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not an apple fanboy in the least, but I own a slew of Apple products. I straight up despise a lot of the business practices of Apple.
The fact of the matter is that while Apple is dirty and selfish, they make better consumer tech products (in their categories) than just about any other company out there. They're also constantly at the bleeding edge, releasing things that no other company has been able to do, or at least "do right." People are willing to pay a premium for a product that's worth it.
Don't confuse fanboyism with common sense. Steve Jobs fanboyism (as a cult following) ended a long time ago. Everyone recognizes that Jobs really only cares about money and power. He just happens to make and release good products as a method to get both.
Patrick Lo should focus on his own company's prospects for success. Netgear is not in the same class as Apple on any financial level:
Netgear
Apple
I think the CEO has more important things to worry about in his own back yard. Apple would have a very far way to fall to be as paltry as Netgear.
Meanwhile, the arguments between iOS and Android platforms have all the hallmarks of a discussion of one fanatical religion over another. The points used are not as they are represented. In the end, neither camp is swayed by the other. Obviously the market is big enough for multiple platforms. I do think it's interesting how often Apple is touted as headed for spectacular failure. One would think, given the number of times that has proven to be inaccurate, there might be a little more skepticism at the predictions.
I would pay more attention, if Netgear was competent in their own area of expertise at least, and could create a wireless router half as good as Airport Extreme. It's freaking embarrassing when Apple sells the only decent option as far as dualband routers are concerned, and it's a side thing for them.
"Today the entire scenario seems to be playing out again in the mobile market."
Yes, and no.
Yes, the vast array of manufacturers producing Android phones will soon overcome Apple's iPhone. There is no doubt about that. However, the stakes aren't nearly the same as they were.
In the original PC wars, different platforms were fundamentally incompatible with each other. The stakes were all-in. Their applications had different data formats and their hardware read different media formats. Networking was rare, and somewhat cumbersome. There was no simple way of getting data between each of different platforms. I clearly remember the hoops I had to jump through to get a simple text file from a Windows 3.1 machine over to a Mac System 6 machine. If everyone you knew, in business or personally, went to one platform, there was great incentive for you to follow them to that platform. Otherwise, you were essentially a pariah.
Now everything important is interoperable. All of these devices work with the same internet technologies (Flash aside). All of your photos, videos (except for this WebM nonsense), and documents can be read and worked with on virtually any platform. If you can't easily transfer your files physically, you can easily send them over the net. Being on a different platform than your friend or business associate is not nearly the same roadblock it used to be, so there's plenty of room for alternative platforms, suited to different tastes and needs, to flourish.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Do you have any idea how many people Apple employs doing HW/SW R&D? care to compare that to other companies?
Do you think that the all those billion dollar products just fall from the frickin sky?
Firstly Android development is not open, the code is developed in private and then published when done. Not open!
This isn't any different from any other open source project - other than scale. Patches to the linux kernel are developer on individual people's machines, tested etc before anyone gets to see them - I see few arguments about Linux not being open source.
Yes google take longer and put more into their 'patches' so to speak but it's only a difference of scale, not a difference of process.
You can still take the source code and create your own version of Android.
Secondly, you can't choose what language to develop in when creating Android, you have to use the Dalvik VM and use libraries for any native code. Not open!
Feel free to fork Android at any point and write in any language (which is of course the point of open source), or write an interpreter in Java to convert to any language and go from there (sure it's slightly painful the interpreter way but JIT gets there eventually).
An open source project is not obliged to ensure that absolutely anything can be done with it, it's obliged to provide the source code so that YOU can add the features you want - it's not obliged to change in order to make it fit with the way you want it. Open source projects means just that, open source.
Has it occurred to you that if you detest using Java so much you could write a patch to Android to provide for whatever language you desire and even persuade google to ship it with their code? It won't be easy, but it's possible - that's the point of open.
Thirdly, if open source was so desirable we would all be using Linux now, OSX and Windows would be dead. The opposite is true.
OSX is based on BSD, it's a wrapper built on open source - poor choice of example there, in fact without the BSD core OSX wouldn't be very good. Windows is also riddled with open source software.
But here, and it appears to be your only point that is valid in your entire tirade, you actually have a point - most people (90+%) use windows.
Of course there's a minor issue with that - Linux isn't as functional as windows unless you don't want to use very much. If you want to game it's just not as capable as windows because fewer games developers use it. If you want to browse the web it's fine, but then again 90+% of computers sold have windows pre-installed, and if you want to use the computer why would you change the OS? It's not what you purchased the computer to do.
I think the argument about Apple and iOS being closed and Android being open isn't really about open vs closed source (certainly I don't really care about that particular difference), I believe that the point that should be made with 'open' vs iOS is that you are heavily restricted in what you can do with the device. On Android if you don't like the current UI you can replace it - you can have an iPhone UI clone, you can have a Windows Phone 7 UI, you can have the interesting slidescreen http://slidescreenhome.com/ UI, you can have a world of innovation available *now* - because, literally, there's an app for that.
This is something that you literally cannot get with an Apple device. Frankly the ideology difference between closed and open source, I couldn't care less - I (personally) care about being able to customise and streamline *my* device. You can't even have applications that look like a homescreen because, well that would confuse users / or Apple doesn't like it.
My biggest issue with iOS? It is flexibility. The possibility of having applications multi-task for whatever reason not just a few restricted cut down options. I can change my UI, I have much more information available at my fingertips than you get on the iPhone. Widgets are much better than icons for some things and having the option is better than not.
I was never into the phone case stuff, or downloadable ringtones that happe
A closed system might be ok right now. There are plenty of consumers who don't want to deal with extra options and functionality in their tech products...for now. But what about the coming decades, when a majority of consumers will have grown up in the digital age. I'd expect they would be more tech savvy and able to handle (and appreciate) more open systems like Android.
And you'd be completely wrong. The new age consumers 'growing up' in the digital age care not a whit for what goes on below the shiny. Yep, they can punch icons and post idiot comments all over the place, they can probably take any digital device made this decade and use it without a thought or a glance at what purports to be a 'manual'. But they have no concept of hardware / software specs much less formats much less open vs. closed. My 15 year old, straight A niece understands not a jot of the underlying computing structure she depends on day to day. But she can manipulate it and show her grandmother how to do things on her iPad. Her brother, OTOH, has a basement full of dead electronics gear and smoke - if he doesn't kill himself or get arrested he will be one of those relatively few people that ARE tech savvy and running the digital world. But he will always be a tiny minority.
Closed vs. Open means nothing to these kids.
Your sad devotion to that ancient Open Source religion has not helped you conjure up the decent market share for Linux on the desktop, or given you enough clairvoyance to find a decent Android tablet..
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!