capnbob

Isn’t that all Agilent these days? Spun off in ’99.

How can you tell anything about a consumer’s desire for Google apps from Android sales? People want a smartphone with 3rd party apps (FB, Twitter, Yelp, etc.) and basic features (mail, phone, vm, Txt). It doesn’t matter what platform you buy. On many carriers and many price points there is no choice but Android. It is no ringing endorsement of Android per se but does speak to its exceptional distribution.

Come back in 2 years with your crap about tablets. I’ll be here waiting.

People love neither. Geeks may love Google but geeks don’t matter. Only search has massive engagement. Gmail is broad but people would easily get by without it. Everything else is niche, including Apps/Docs. The only brand that is broadly “loved” is the one so many nerds love to hate.

No way. You need a brain shot to destroy the autonomic controls in the brain stem/amygdala/basal ganglia. This is not a big target. Putting a tiny hole in a frontal lobe or 2 won’t get the job done. Those bits are dead already.

Dude, Zombie 101 ;-)

Dream on. Deduct the craplets, Kindle Fire and Nook and “real” Android like GTabs and Transformers are about 10-15%. If Apple releases the 7.85" iPad mini (which seems increasingly likely) and prices it under $300 then Android can kiss goodbye to any attempt at market dominance. IPads are like iPods, no pesky carriers to get in the way. Android phones have the highest sales volume thanks to the punch of carriers who didn’t have or didn’t want the iPhone and it makes them more money (cheaper subsidy). In every other metric (revenue, profit, apps, devs, Dev dollars, customer satisfaction, OEM success, repurchase rates, content, etc.) it is second best. Without the control of the distribution channel like phones, Android’s a lot weaker than its fans would hope. With the intense fragmentation, Samsung crushing the other OEMs and Google losing control of the ecosystem (Nook, Amazon) and Samsung likely to fork Android too, there is no reason for Android to win in the tablet market. Just sayin’

What a load of crap.

1. Majority of staff are in the US (since they don’t employ any manufacturing staff). The majority of their staff are now in the retail stores (60%). 80% of their total staff are employed in the US (47K out of 60K)
2. 60% of their revenue comes from sales outside the US
3. You find any US factories able to hire 10,000 staff in 3 weeks, or ramp up production of a new device to 40M per quarter from scratch or produce 60M complex electronic devices each quarter. Then talk about “talent”. The US is just not set up for global high-volume CE manufacturing any more. Found any million person factories recently? Cars, it still does OK.

Problem is that cloud is based on anonymous commoditized cheap racks of servers with little opportunity for differentiation, little room for selling expensive Itaniums where they used to make better margins etc.

The cloud may be doing well but it doesn’t mean that HP is.

They sold all that off years ago in the Agilent divestiture.

Audacious indeed. It’s almost like no one else has ever used this business strategy before. I bet if someone did that, they might be able to take 45% of all the PC industry profits on 5% of the volume. But that is just random speculation because who would have already had this audacious idea? You go Samsung…

Are you mental? iPad 3 is 275 ppi. Higher res on smaller screen.

You severely underestimate Apple. IF they were going to come in, they would drop a few Billions on terminal readers and undercut the CCPs. Drop in the ocean for them. MasterCard revenue last year was $6.7Bn with $1.9Bn profit. You don’t think Apple can outmuscle these guys if it wanted to (and saw the need to?)

Difference now is Apple has 350M of the best demographic customers in the world with credit cards and $110Bn in the bank (growing at $10-15Bn each quarter).
Back in 2001, Apple needed an outside threat. Today, Apple is the outside threat… To the carriers, credit card processors and banks – 3 of the most hated groups of companies on the planet. Payments would be for Apple some kind of break even incentive for buying Apple gear. “Get and iPhone, use it to buy stuff” out of the box. Apple can easily drop a few billion to get devices to retailers and then charge them less than the 3% the CCP guys currently charge. Consumer happy, merchants happy. Old interests… Gutted. That would be priceless!

While that may be a nerd dream, I am not sure it will really work so well in practice. The need for multiple docks in different locations and to probably carry around some form of laptop shell reduces the benefit of the universal device. That is why there is so much focus on cloud as sync mechanism.
What if your one device goes down? At what point will the devices be a no-compromise universal device since I would rather have optimized devices than make compromises? The universal device is always on like your phone but also has to put in potentially hours of productivity work etc. putting strain on the single battery. At least my laptop’s 5hrs is separate from my phone’s 14hrs from my tablet’s 10 hrs. My phone won’t die because I had to crack on with a big PPT session. Anyway, we’ll see how well the vendors can mitigate the trade offs.

The other thing I would add is that I doubt that the OEMs want a one device strategy. I think they all do better in a world of multiple devices. A typical Apple house will have an iMac, a laptop, an iPad or 2 a touch and an iphone or 2. Apple makes out like a bandit. If I went to one device, Lenovo would lose their Thinkpad sale. Single devices would create less diversity in the OEM world and only the strongest would survive (Apple and ??)

I get the impression (and the market would back me up on this) that people DON’T want 1 device. Nerds on the Verge do but in the real world. people want the right device at the right time. Laptop for work, iMac for home use, iPad on the coffee table, phone on the road. Nerds are a weird bunch. We strain our eyes watching movies, surfing the web and composing long emails on our phones and think it’s cool but most people do not want to do that.

Anyone else find it odd when reading the thing about the Cadillac manuals coming on iPad and a lot of comments saying they want the info-tainment run from the iPad too. I for one would love Siri integration for the ICE system, but don’t expect me to remember my iPad everyday and take it out to the car. I don’t want to and would be so pissed on the 1 in 20 days I did forget it or someone borrowed it, or a kid spilled milk on it, that it would ruin the 19 days of fun when it was there. Use an iPad in the car, but leave it in the car. Please. Back to the point. This isn’t Middle Earth – we don’t need one ring to rule them all (though we need a good cloud to keep them all sync’d)

+1

It’s a pickle…

Tim says… NO

(until he says YES ;-)

Maybe – but we are then in the chicken and egg situation – no software = no sales, no sales = no software. The legacy investments of both users/companies and devs are highly devalued.

In case it’s not clear, I believe that Win8 tabs will lose out to Win8 ultrabooks in many head to heads for legacy uses – bigger screens, better keyboards, better battery life, faster processors, etc.