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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? :)
YEP. Most people don't actually care if the devices are open or closed, they don't even notice it until they need to migrate their data (contacts etc..) to a new device. Things like having special incompatible cables and software for each device is also perfectly normal for them, it has been like that since forever so people is somewhat used to it.
As I see it, the only difference now is that Apple provides polished products that actually work with minimal effort. It is a big win for everybody except for us, hackers, that want control over every piece of hardware and software.
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.
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.
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 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?