John Dvorak, please stop smoking crack

I am not even going to link to that moron because I know this is just another attempt at link-baiting. He does not want Apple to enter the cellphone market because

1) Apple has not shown the ability to improve their marketshare in the PC market
2) Apple, evidently, does not know how to rapid product development (UHHH?)
3) Microsoft has not been leverage it’s mobile OS into a grand success

With (3) in mind, he recommends that Apple should license their design as a reference platform. Guess what moron, reference platforms in the mobile world are dime a dozen – no one wants to pay for a license (yeah, that will improve already anemic margins!) Apple does not go for market share (unlike Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung): it differentiates and retains high margins. That is their core strategy.

This is also a difference between Steve Jobs, John Dvorak, and others: he is not afraid of failure. For Steve, it’s a badge of honor – for John Dvorak, it’s a punchline. That perhaps is the difference between an innovator and an observer.

Here’s a recommendation for Dvorak: go back to school or read a marketing textbook.

US music phone adoption rose 385% y-o-y

Via Infectious Greed:

While the United States lags these markets, with only 17 percent, or 33 million, of mobile subscribers owning a musicphone, it has shown impressive growth in the past year: a 385 percent increase from January 2006 to January 2007.

More from the M:Metrics research:

“There has been consumer experimentation with over-the-air, full-track downloads, but downloading music from carrier music stores has yet to make a significant impact,” observed Wu. “The two main barriers to greater adoption of over-the-air music services – accessibility and fair value – are lesser issues with sideloaded music. The prevalence of sideloading, largely shaped by current usage and understanding of digital music players, shows that the perceived value in musicphones is still in the ability to make one’s personal music collection portable, as opposed to a new acquisition point for music.”

The substitution of standalone digital music players by musicphones is increasingly visible. M:Metrics found that 31 percent of those that use both a musicphone and a digital music player in the United States selected their musicphone as their primary music device, while 11 percent use both equally. Continued substitution can be expected, as almost a third of January phone sales in the United States were musicphones.

In the United States, users of standalone digital music players who also use a LG Chocolate or Motorola SLVR L7 to listen to music are 60 percent more likely than average to choose their phones as their primary music players.

June is coming …..

Does unlimited really mean unlimited?

Yahoo makes news today by removing caps on storage. I wonder if Yahoo’s definition of unlimited:

The folks over at Yahoo finally realized this was silly and have decided to just ditch the limits entirely, offering unlimited email usage for everyone. Storage is cheap. Getting and keeping users are expensive. If you can use unlimited storage to get and keep users, it’s probably worth it.

will be similar to a cable firm’s definition of unlimited:

Unlimited: not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity or extent. Seems pretty straightforward, right? Apparently not to broadband providers, who seem to interpret it a bit differently. Because they’ve marketed their services as unlimited, then done a poor job of designing their networks, they get upset when people actually take advantage of those supposedly unlimited connections, and complain that they’re screwing everything up for all their other users. Comcast is the latest to start giving people the boot for using too much bandwidth, even though they don’t have a published limit.

or a telco’s definition of unlimited:

Over the last year, Verizon Wireless has been repeatedly slammed online for their misleading tactic of selling their wireless EVDO service as “unlimited” but then cutting off users who use too much. For a while this was a “fuzzy cap” where they wouldn’t even tell you how much. It was estimated at 10gigs per month, though more recent comments from the company suggest that it’s actually 5 gigs. As for why this isn’t false advertising, Verizon Wireless execs have been doing some fancy footwork to explain how they mean “unlimited amounts of data for certain types of data.

or will unlimited really mean unlimited? Somehow I doubt it will.

HP MCE RIP: Countdown to a Zune Media Center?

Via Slashdot:

The first big adapter of Microsoft’s Media Center Edition is quietly dropping MCE. HP is ceasing production of its Digital Entertainment Center, the only real success story for Media Center PCs in a living-room form factor. As the first company to embrace Microsoft’s MCE, at a time when the platform was still half-baked, HP was simply spent by the time Vista rolled around. Now the company will put its resources into MediaSmart, a new line of TVs with a digital media adapter (not an MCE) built in. HP insists that its departure is not a statement about the viability of the Media Center platform.

Based on history (i.e. MP3 player market), expect a Microsoft/Zune branded MCE (XBOX 360 TV ambitions notwithstanding) followed by the inevitable media blitz explaining why the Zune MCE was needed: because Microsoft partners sucked.

Apple flops – the analysis

Newlaunches.com takes a whack at Apple’s “top 10″ failures:

10. Cyberdog
9. Taligent
8. Apple eWorld
7. Apple Pippin
6. 20th Anniversary Mac
5. Motorola ROKR
4. Macintosh TV
3. Macintosh Portable
2. Apple Lisa
1. Apple Newton

It’s interesting to note that Steve Jobs was at Apple for only two of those items on the top ten list (and it’s sort of a stretch to claim Motorola ROKR was an Apple product). Wonder how many of those other substandard efforts would have been green-lighted by Jobs.

Of course, it won’t take long for folks to bring up NeXT, the Cube, and Apple III.

Apple TV and iTunes sales are not tied together

For some reason analysts keep expecting Apple TV and iTunes movie sales to be connected. They are not.

In all the buzz around the prospects for the AppleTV set-top box, there has been remarkably little discussion on a key issue: the lack of full-length movies available for download from Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes music store.

I keep repeating myself. Apple TV is following the same path as the iPod.

Let’s review. iTunes only began selling songs in 2003, almost 18 months after the iPod made its debut. iPod owners have bought an average of 20 songs per iPod the past five years. The iPod became popular independent of iTunes music sales.

Apple TV is following same path. Early adopters will use it, hack it, and rework it, similar to the way the first gen iPod was hacked to run Linux and other oddities.

People keep forgetting that Apple is a hardware company. Any content or software that they sell is just an added incentive for users to keep buying hardware. Check back in 2 years when Apple TV owners will be averaging about 2.5 movies per unit sold (for a total of 25 million full length feature movies).