CNET, the technology web site, has already created a special section on their web site covering the latest on Apple's latest overnight success: the iPhone.
Visit CNET
iPhone news, reviews, videos web site if you would like to take a look at it for yourself.
About a year ago, a former coworker of mine avidly professed his certainty that when the iPhone came out, it would be a flop.
The phone did far better than his prediction. Apple announced last week that in less than two quarters, the iPhone became the #2 best selling smartphone in the world. Blackberry, made by Canadian company RIM is the #1 selling smartphone. All the others have already moved down a position.
Blackberry has over a third of that market. Apple commands exactly half the market share that Blackberry has, according to the statistics from Apple.
What that tells me is that the rest of the smartphone market is very fragmented indeed. If each remaining competitor has less than one-sixth market share, they are not in control of all that much. They cannot set sweeping standards unless they band together.
Apple has banded together a bunch of standard technologies itself. Web Services, XHTML, and so forth are all part of the iPhone technology. Apple has a section of its site dedicated to rounding up the latest and the greatest iPhone / iPod Touch web apps so that their customers will not have to hunt far and wide to get their hands on these goodies.
Apple is rolling out the iPhone SDK that some developers have been clamoring to get. It will be familiar ground to many, since at this point there are probably not too many web developers and programmers who have not used these technologies.
Labels: apple, cnet, iphone, news, standards
I do not really believe the answer to that question is
yes. Nor do I believe there is not a grain of truth to the notion that Apple did a little bit to hasten the demise of that bastion of IBM-PC clone computers - COMP-USA.
Not since Egghead Software went belly up in the 1990s has a brand-name computer store this well known gone under.
In his article,
Lament for COMP-USA, John C. Dvorak lays out several explanations for what went wrong at COMP-USA.
The last item on his list is that COMP-USA stores were not more like Apple stores.
What?! Is this the same John C. Dvorak that predicted the demise of Apple Computer for almost a decade before he threw in the towel at that game a year or two ago?
Indeed it is.
Now he is saying Apple stores - most all of which are unchanged since their introduction over half a decade ago are the
right way to do computer retail. COMP-USA, he explains, epitomized the
wrong way to do it.
I am not sure he is right on the mark but I am sure of one thing.
Consumers got less and less value out of a trip to COMP-USA. The staff gradually became nothing more than cash register jockeys and shelf stocking clerks.
They were not super knowledgeable about the products they sold. They did not have a name-brand computer family of their own.
There did not seem to be a direction for their products. There was no unifying vision. There was just a tireless march of randomness. Also, the computers they sold required lots of patches, bandages, fixes - and that was
not getting any better. If anything, during the past half decade the situation with the bulk of the computers sold at COMP-USA has been deteriorating.
What Dvorak does not point out is that dates back to almost the exact same time that Apple opened the first of its
own computer stores.
While there is certainly no cause-and-effect relationship between those two things, the effects of both certainly magnify each other.
The non-Apple computers typified by COMP-USA are hardly a paragon of reliable computing. In fact, the sort of computers sold by COMP-USA and similar retailers are plagued with dangers for which they nor other stores had a real fix.
There are all kinds of rationales for why that is - which seem, in a word: wrong.
The reality is simply those sorts of computer have that problem in real life. They have had it bad for over half a decade. And it is not getting any better - nor does it seem to.
A lot of people come to the iMac, iPod, iPhone, etc. seeking a sort of refuge from the torrent of issues and problems they are afflicted with when they use competing products.
Cell phone so hard to use you will practically never text or do email with it by the time you have had it a few months? Try iPhone.
Computer
runs too slowly
because it has just been overun with organized crime and advertiser gobbledygook? Try a Mac - it does not seem to have that affliction.
Your MP3-player not really working with song files and computers they way its manufacturer said it would? Try Apple iPod - its maker built a wondrous appliance and practically lets it sell itself. That sure beats trying to explain past failings and predicting future solutions for a very bleak present.
IBM PC-clone computers have really been stuck in a rut since the late 1990s. It is one that bad guys know far better than the good guys. And they are milking that superior knowledge for all it is worth.
Apple is milking its knowledge of how to build superior consumer-oriented products for all it is worth too. As it has for decades.
All these factors probably helped send COMP-USA on the way to its demise.
When you also take into account that there is an extremly thin profit margin left on computing products PC cloner hucksters have. Computer that no longer have speed, performance, capability, ease of use, name brand cachet, or retailer expertise cannot really charge a premium on anything.
What is really left in many cases is non-profits and loss-leaders. Pretty much at the end game for some of these companies in the PC ecosphere.
I used to go to COMP-USA a lot in the 1990s. However, since then they became practically irrelevant to me and millions of other people.
I think
that is what killed them.
Labels: apple, computing
