iPad, Apple's 'Mac of the masses,' predicted to sell 21M in 2011 - Page 3

Interesting points. I think we have a situation here whereby RIM culture is so built up on business and the style, ethics and drive of "the suits". Interestingly, the product has attracted a following on the strength of some of its features. The question is, can RIM stay relevant and update itself for both markets? I would suggest they create a sub-brand. Just like Poppy under Coach. That should be what they are focusing on, not trying to play catch-up with a tablet that may or may not have good business use until a year from now... Though I would like to see the Blackpad gain traction, there just aren't enough iPads to go around in global usage even through end of next year!


I think what you're missing is the fact that a lot of people activate the iPad (this can be done in-store), then just use it for months without syncing with their computers. Music and podcasts, videos, movies can be downloaded on the iPad, apps and mail, Internet all no problem without a laptop. People with iPhones are notorious for going almost up to a year without figuring out what sync is... Regarding sync on AppleTV, for example, Steve said, "some people don't even know what that is...". It will take some time, but by middle to late next year iOS 5 will probably have iPad and iPhone untethered and non-forced OTA upgrades and some free cloud backup services. iPhone 5 probably will come with MobileMe Lite or something... Maybe.

A given -- as in, satisfaction guaranteed or your money back?

Well reasoned and well said!

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As in, "I'm not an analyst, but I play one on TV. I also offer MBA degrees..."

B
Don't be too hard on the analysts -- they are preaching to the only choir that will follow them!

I was with you, when the analysts estimated total tablet sales for 2010 would be 10.5 million units -- I predicted that 10 million of those would be iPads! I was way low!

I think your estimates of 7 million a month are attainable -- even without an iPad 2 announcement.

What has to happen is:

-- mass purchases by households - 1 per family member and several dedicated to specific uses
-- mass acceptance by education at all levels
-- mass acceptance by enterprise/organizational groups - medical, government, supermarkets, etc.

This is the biggie:

-- mass acceptance by mom & pop small businesses - restaurants, dry cleaners, pet stores...


It's gonna' happen!

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1. BlackBerry's enterprise features sell themselves to businesses. Of course RIM should continue to develop the enterprise side of BlackBerry. That's a major bit of RIM's identity as a company. But I think that one thing you don't quite understand is that the teens will care about none of the enterprise features in a BlackBerry. They don't care, and they don't have to, because all of those features stay deeply in the background and don't get in the way of their own user experience (which is primarily BBM and Facebook-driven).

So this whole thing of creating a kids-oriented sub-brand is unneccessary, both in marketing costs and R&D. Microsoft tried this with Kin, and it failed. I believe it's primarily because they didn't follow the "Pixar Theorem". What is that? Well, basically, Pixar movies are known as being incredibly entertaining for adults, as much as they are for even the younger kids out there. One of the Pixar execs was interviewed a while back, and asked why that was. His response: "We don't make movies for kids." He explained that they make movies for themselves, then take out anything objectionable to kids. Furthermore, he said that kids aren't as stupid as many people think.

What BlackBerry offers is Pixar in a phone. Teens get something; adults get it, too, but also have a bunch of other stuff, just for them. But that's all on the same device, with the same OS. Microsoft didn't try that with Kin.

BBM sells itself to kids, once they see it and use it. BBM works fine with the current RIM phones. Get kids into BlackBerry/BBM as kids, watch them become adults, then see them stay with BlackBerry as they grow into those enterprise features (which were always there), helping them in their newfound careers! In other words, let BlackBerry be whatever the user wants it to be. This process currently is seamless.

2. The focus on tablets is absolutely a necessity for RIM. Gosh, the dinosaur known as RIM gets it more than Microsoft does! Go read this thread again, and see if you can re-evaluate the point of tablets. Read (or re-read) my post about connection between Microsoft and IBM. This is a huge emerging market that is scratching the surface on what it can do. Google and Apple are already in the market. RIM needs to get into this market ASAP, and so does Microsoft (even though MS doesn't know it, yet). I can't blame RIM for focusing on what they are.


An interesting question, that I don't have the answer to: How will Apple be able to minimize the number of OTA updates, and therefore the strain on cell carriers? Will OTA updates and MobileMe Lite require WiFi? Will they only be available after, say, 15 days of availability? Will there still be the option to do it wired, via iTunes, once the OTA dialog appears?

I'll take two!

It still doesn't keep someone from building a car control system around iOS devices. Free app for you Nissan in the app store. Don't own an iOS device? There's an accessory package with one included. Why not? IOS is certainly better and more capable platform than the embedded systems currently being used in many cars.

I was referring mainly to phones - but since the iPad is "just" a big iPod Touch I would consider it far more mature than any of the iPad killers. That still aren't shipping.

The only company that isn't being totally reactionary is HP - and even their moves are mostly reactionary (and not shipping either).

Actually, MS screwed IBM - they "partnered" with IBM on OS/2 while secretly also working on windows. Once Windows was to a good enough point they left IBM high and dry.

The fact that companies are still willing to sign up to resell things like Windows Phone 7 still boggles my mind (plays for sure being one of the latest abusing of "partners" that carries on this fine tradition).

Always is a long time. They may not support it today, but it's not a stretch to assume that one day Apple couldn't support a stand alone cloud based iPad. They have to be planning something for that huge data center.

I hope you are right!

BTW is there a problem with your exclamation and question mark keys?

MobileMe Lite could be cellular and wifi like MobileMe now. OTA updates would be wifi only. iTunes will still definitely be allowed for more extensive backup and such.

A number of years ago, the chairman of AT&T said that "Bill Gates can be your partner and be your enemy at the same time."

it wasn't really that MS screwed ibm, ibm did it to themselves. they wanted the os tied to their hardware so that you had to use ibm for everything. but dos ran on lots of non-ibm machines. the clones. and ms needed to sell to those as well, so windows 3.0.
clones and windows 3 were a big hit and the 'ibm only' strategy failed. so ms ditched os/2 and went whole hog with Windows.
that same idea is what would have dramatically changed maybe killed off apple back before jobs returned. cheap clones with apple os. why buy apple hardware? jobs stopped that first thing.

IBM first tried to reclaim control of their hardware platform with Micro Channel. Good technology, poorly implemented. But it's pretty apparent that Microsoft screwed IBM with OS/2, probably with forethought. They partnered with IBM to develop the technology, saying publicly that the were totally committed to OS/2, then bugged out in a hurry when Windows 3.0 took off. Probably that was the plan all along. Some of the OS/2 technology turned up in WindowsNT. IBM had lots of faults at the time, but topping the list was trusting Bill Gates.

everyone blames bill gates. what was ms to do? develop an os that ibm clearly wanted to control and then allow ibm to dump ms or at best be the developer of an ibm only os?
ibm wanted control of the os and the hardware. ms just did what it had to do to stay relevant and make money. ibm was trying to do the same, they failed. so i don't see it as ms was 'plotting' to screw ibm.

I'm not sure I understand your point. It's not a matter of blame. Assume both companies were "plotting" to control their markets. I do. It's only natural. The point I am making here is that more than one company found out to their chagrin that Bill & Co. would pledge partnership and then work feverishly behind the scenes to undermine them. Sometimes they partnered for no other reason than to use their partnership access to snuff a potential competitor. It took awhile but Microsoft developed a reputation as an untrustworthy partner. When companies didn't need them as much, they looked elsewhere for partnerships. I think Microsoft is still trying to live down their reputation as an unreliable partner, which goes back to incidents like their handling of IBM and OS/2.

maybe. i really don't know what all went on behind the scenes.
all i know is that if it weren't for the clones and windows i wouldn't have had a computer for myself for a much longer period of time. i love the mac. thought it was the coolest thing ever but i couldn't afford one. clones were cheaper and you could add all sorts of things, upgrade components from many different companies. i really didn't dislike ms until IE and killing netscape.

We also know nothing is magical (at least from Apple) for you

If Apple were purely profit motivated then gee.... they would be like everyone else kicking out mediocre products with minimal end user focus.

Since they aren't like every other manufacturer, there probably is more than a kernel of truth to the statement.

I think you would have disliked Microsoft far sooner if you'd known what they were doing to create and preserve their market dominance. I also can't agree with the proposition that Microsoft had anything to do with cloning and were in any way responsible for the commodity pricing of hardware. This was the fault of IBM. What was created, essentially by accident, was a market with lots of participants but one where a single company made the lion's share of the profit. Had the market been more diverse (i.e., healthier), prices to consumers overall would have been lower, not higher. As it happened, PC clone hardware prices might have been driven down, but at the same time, PC buyers were paying monopoly rents to Microsoft.

As for precisely what happened behind the scenes with IBM, we'll probably never know (just as we'll never hear the complete story about how IBM chose Microsoft to produce DOS), but we witnessed Microsoft shafting partners often enough over the years to get the general drift.

i didn't say ms did the cloning. i said the clones ran dos. ibm choosing to use off the shelf parts that allowed people to recreate and sell a machine clone (well, they reverse engineered the ibm BIOS).
allowed the clones to happen.
totally disagree with your 'diverse' statements. lets see what happens in the smartphone market in a few years and see if you are right. think someone will come out of that with the bigger piece of the pie?

IBM had no intention of creating a generic hardware platform. As you know, they intended to protect it from duplication with the copyrighted ROM-BIOS. Even so, the clones could have run any number of operating systems. In fact they did, but Microsoft used a variety of anticompetitive tactics to run the alternatives out of the market. And this was good for consumers, how exactly?

Diversity is the result of competition, which is always a good thing. It's how efficient markets for goods work. Someone may come out with the biggest slice of the pie in any competitive market, but not the sort of 95% dominance of the PC that Microsoft was gifted virtually from the very start. Everyone seems to be looking for a repeat of the Microsoft phenomenon, as though total dominance of any market by one player is good or inevitable. Fortunately, in fact, it is rare. It would be difficult to name another one like it.

first you need to prove ms used anticompetitive tactics to run the others out of business. i looked at the history of the amiga and find no mention of that type of thing. what about the others?

Missed that whole convicted monopolist and operating under a consent decree thing, eh?

yes, put a link or some valid data on here so i can see it. i didn't know that went on during the early years with amiga os and the other oses of the period. thanks,

i looked around. i found the famous trial info from 2000. if that is what you mean then you aren't paying attention to what i am talking about.

See U.S. v Microsoft, for starters, which was the direct result of an earlier Consent Decree. Not sure what else to do, short of explaining the entire thing.

Where does Amiga come into this?

where does amiga come into this? where does apple come into this or any other of the early competitors? <sarcasm>..... never mind you are skewing the time tables to match your chatter.

i am not talking about netscape and windows i thought we were talking about competition in the early days where you claimed ms was using illegal means to squash them.

Sarcasm is not conducive to discussion.

I did not mention Apple or Amiga in this context, because they are not immediately relevant. No timelines are being skewed. What I am relating is Microsoft's use of anticompetitive means to lock up the PC platform. One technique in particular which they used to great effect was the so-called CPU tax. Beginning in the mid-1980s at least, a Microsoft OEM had to pay them a license fee for every CPU they sold, whether or not it was loaded with a Microsoft OS. This tactic put all other OSs at an immediate competitive disadvantage. In a Consent Decree, Microsoft agreed to stop doing that bad thing. Then they found other ways to keep the OEMs in line. Which led to an investigation at the FTC, which led to U.S. v Microsoft. The Findings of Fact included a litany of their antitrust law violations -- check this document out sometime, you might find it illuminating.

So, if you want to talk about Apple in this context, they do figure in at least as an example of Microsoft's power and how they wielded it. During the late '80s - early '90s timeframe, Apple was developing a version of MacOS for the PC platform. You might have heard of this, it was called Project Star Trek. In the depositions in the government's case against Microsoft, Apple execs testified that Project Star Trek was abandoned in part due to Apple's inability to work with any of the OEMs, which had been brought to heal by Microsoft in a variety of ways, including the one described above.

so if ms was being so naughty and keeping poor companies down (like apple...wait, you could buy an apple without an oem and without dealing with ms couldn't you?) then after they lost and were ordered to stop why didn't they lose ground? why did companies like the one i work at rid themselves of macs and go all windows? pressure from ms? pressure from oem?
not trying to say windows is great or ms is wonderful just i don't buy the whole 'ms is top dog because they break the law and are unethical and evil etc.'

I am simply describing what happened, because you asked. Maybe you only asked because you didn't think I had an answer. I don't know. You seem to accept that what Microsoft did to Netscape was wrong, and somehow changed your opinion about the company. What I am telling you is, all of these anticompetitive shenanigans were going on long before Netscape, and it happened to a lot of other companies. Those of us who knew what they were doing changed our opinions about Microsoft long ago.

i wasn't aware of the 1994 decree and the oem 'license'. i am not saying that ms hasn't done some dodgy things (and they aren't the only one apparently).
it was a tiring day and i was tired. sorry for not seeing your point.

Not a problem. We all have days like that.

It's October 4, 2010. If I was an analyst I would really be wondering where the heck all those iPad international launches are at. What happened to them? Seriously.

one of the chief reasons RIM is so successful with their Blackberry, in the corporate world, is their encryption / security layer.