Slashdot Mirror
Apple Is Outdated, Says Chinese Conglomerate LeEco CEO (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article on CNBC: Apple is "outdated" and losing momentum in China, billionaire entrepreneur Jia Yueting told CNBC in his first international television interview. "Apple only has individual apps. This was the right choice during the first generation of mobile net, when CPUs [central processing units] and the mobile network speeds were not fast enough," Jia said. "However now we're moving into the next era of mobile internet, these problems no longer exist. Moreover, having separate apps just means great obstacles in the user experience. We hope to break down these obstacles. One of the most important reasons [for slowing sales] is that Apple's innovation has become extremely slow," he said. "For example, a month ago Apple launched the iPhone SE. From an industry insider's perspective, this is a product with a very low level of technology... We think this is something they just shouldn't have done. [...] The Watch hasn't cut it. And they're looking at content on the services side, on the iTunes side. We'll see how that works out. But definitely they need something to drive the next leg of growth." In some other Apple news, the company is expected to announce its first quarterly year-over-year revenue decline since 2003 later today.
Apple has many businesses still growing - if you thought of any one product Apple makes a business, it would generally be growing more than most companies around.
The AppleWatch for example, was estimated to have sold more than twice the units of the first iPhone - and sales in the first twelve months brought in $1.5 billion more than Rolex.
Apple's music and video sales are constantly growing. Apple Mac sales still see a healthy growth every quarter. Apple's services growth is greater than Google at this point, and because services are tied to hardware which Apple has so much of in the field, there's no reason to think service growth will slow.
Even the iPhone is still growing more than not.
Sometimes what the "law of large numbers" means is that if you are large enough, you win.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's simple - he wants to...
1) make a super-wrapper app of sorts where individual apps become mere features within his wrapper.
2) get a lot of attention by yapping about how the industry leader is "outdated" and that his naked money-grab is actually the new-shiny.
3) sell API access to his wrapper.
4) sucker some phone maker/carrier/etc into using his wrapper exclusively.
5) ???
6) Profit!
Of course, no mention is made as to what happens when his baby gets a security vuln , crashes (taking everything else with it), or otherwise isn't regularly updated by the carrier or maker (because seriously, outside of a few corner cases involving flagship phones, when was the last time a carrier or maker ever bothered posting/pushing updates to an Android device?)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The funny thing is I am getting used to hearing this special kind of rambling. It's an epidemic in dealing with nearly every IT or really any engineering resource in Southeast Asia, especially certain parts of China, all of India, and others. It appears to stem from two intellectual deficiencies. The first is big picture thinking. I've met plenty of engineers who were one trick ponies and couldn't even see how their expertise in X could be applied to Y, much less understood how their knowledge fit in the tapestry of technical architecture. The second is the need to fill time / space with words when they have nothing useful. A huge list of banal generalities spew out, either positive or negative based on what they think the audience wants to hear.
The outsourcing movement has a couple more decades of rubber band-like hysteresis. Most companies that send technical services out to Chennai or Bangalore save their short term cash for 2-4 years, pay the CEO and CIO their bonuses, and then bring them back to the US as soon as they can get out of the contracts they've signed.
Actually in Asia its very common to have a single super app rather than a dozen. One app will be your messaging, shopping, mobile pay, taxi hailer, etc. THey go in for all-in-one over there. So far the US and EU haven't followed suit.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?