The Apple Execution Dazzle Thread

They are one of the few companies who can figure out what people want / need and execute on it. Other companies spend too much time trying to get in on existing markets whereas Apple seems to tend to execute into fresh segments or revitalise old segments.

 

Depends on what you mean by blow past really.

They already passed Microsoft's market cap in May which made them the 2nd largest US stock not far behind Exxon Mobil.

Sky is the limit it seems if you're evil enough.

 

It really depends on what happens to the iphone. Andriod continues growing at its current pace and win 7 catches on fire like andriod did then iphones may start slipping.

It also seems that cell phoens are starting to replace mp3 players as alot of people who used to buy new ipods every year have stopped and use thier iphones/andriod phones instead.

 

you mean mp3 players or the price of smart phones ?

Its not really the smart phone thats the problem but the price of the monthly plan. You can easily add 3 times times the cost of the phone over a two year contract. I know my monthly plan went up $40 when i first got a data plan basicly $960 extra over 2 years.

I love my zune hd and i use it because i simply can't fit 32 gigs music and video on my phone right now. Moving foward i wont see much of a need for a dedicated player anymore except when battery becomes important.

 

You mean they are one of the few companies who can successfully tell people what they want, right? I'm pretty sure no one wanted, let alone needed an iPad before Apple (with the help of the bunch of sheep who make up the press) built a huge hype around it.

 

Maybe it is due to the fact that they are putting in even more powerful/expensive hardware to compete and they aren't amortizing costs over XM iTouch 14M iPhone and 4M iPads, whereas they have very small volume.

I wouldn't call myself a sheep, though I live in a country with many. I find the iPad is a perfect machine for browsing and playing music / youtube videos. Give the people what they actually want, an easy to use appliance, and they will buy it up if the price is right.

 

The sheep are the journalists who would write an article every time someone would mention anything about Apple and a tablet in the same sentence, just because it was Apple, months ahead of any announcement. And for months, there were countless reports about it, which effectively built a huge hype and gave Apple a tremendous marketing campaign that cost them exactly $0.

 

That's not what I meant, I was talking about the pre-launch hype. And do you remember how many newspapers talked about the iPad when it was launched, even though it was mostly received as a giant iPod Touch as you point out?

Had the press not acted as Apple's bitch through the whole pre-launch hype phase, most people wouldn't even have heard of the iPad.

To put it simply, the press talked about the iPad a lot, even if it wasn't always good. That's enough to significantly boost sales.

 

Yeah I don't subscribe to that notion either. The bottom line to me is that you really don't need to justify an Apple purchase. Their stuff's desirability is completely self-evident.

Steve Jobs seems to possess a unique sense for coming up with stuff that is enough toy to make almost everyone want to play with it, for a while at least, and enough utility not to feel embarassed about doing so.

 

Well the thing is the media hype was so huge that almost everyone heard about the iPad. Even if only 0.5% of the people who've heard about it buy it, that's still a lot because that's 0.5% of almost everyone.

Had there been no hype, it might be 3% because only tech-oriented people would have heard of it, but by the same token, it would be 3% of a much smaller base, and that would amount to a much smaller number of people in the end.

Obviously, I've pulled those percentages straight out of my ass, but you get the point.

 

Almost all the hardware in the Apple tablet is shared with the iPhone devices. That means that apple has significant built in quantities of scale (order 60 million BEFORE iPADs are counted) which allows them a lot of leverage with suppliers and large scale amortization of NRE.

In contrast, for the other OEMs, their tablet designs are pretty much new product lines with little to no part overlap with anything else they make.

 

You are making assumptions that have been proven wrong. There apparently were a significant number of people who wanted or were at least interested in a tablet like device. I know people who were things about effectively what the iPAD is for a long time and leveraging other devices to fulfill the space sub optimally.

The iPAD is near perfect as the coffee table PC.

 

Yeah, cause it isn't at all like apple has proved that they have the consumer appliance mojo that makes them the envy of pretty much every other company in the computer and consumer electronics space. It isn't like the iPAD was the first tablet. Just like the ipod wasn't the first DMP. Just like the iphone wasn't the first smartphone. So far the company had been batting a 1000 at bringing categories of products into the mainstream and reaping the benefit. They had successfully built two significant markets upon which a whole slew of devices ended up following.

I mean as a reporter covering technology, it would be absolutely stupid to report on a new product in a new category from Apple!