Amazon's premium Fire Phone seeks to reverse Android's ratchet status

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  • Reply 81 of 118
    freediverxfreediverx Posts: 1,423member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Benjamin Frost View Post





    Apple's share of the phone market has gone up every year since it came out in 2007.

     

    Not only has Apple's share of the smartphone market continued to increase every year, but Android's share peaked in 2012 and declined in 2013.

     

    It's also important to remind everyone that this view of market share is flawed since you're grouping top of the line phones along with cheap, crappy devices. A more useful analysis would break smartphones and tablets into segments.

     

     

  • Reply 82 of 118
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Benjamin Frost View Post





    You obviously missed the WWDC.



    CloudKit has decimated AWS.

    CloudKit will help out some small iOS-onlystartup apps, but it doesn't offer anything like the scalability and flexibility of AWS, or its platform agnosticism.  It hasn't decimated anything yet, and it's unlikely it'll have a significant impact on any of the big storage providers.

  • Reply 83 of 118
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by freediverx View Post

     

     

    Not only has Apple's share of the smartphone market continued to increase every year, but Android's share peaked in 2012 and declined in 2013.

     

    It's also important to remind everyone that this view of market share is flawed since you're grouping top of the line phones along with cheap, crappy devices. A more useful analysis would break smartphones and tablets into segments.


    US market share.  Important distinction.

     

    Also, interesting chart; I didn't realise Symbian was fairly popular, albeit declining, in the US pre-2007.

  • Reply 84 of 118
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Crowley View Post

     
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by freediverx View Post

     

     

    Not only has Apple's share of the smartphone market continued to increase every year, but Android's share peaked in 2012 and declined in 2013.

     

    It's also important to remind everyone that this view of market share is flawed since you're grouping top of the line phones along with cheap, crappy devices. A more useful analysis would break smartphones and tablets into segments.


    US market share.  Important distinction.

     

    Also, interesting chart; I didn't realise Symbian was fairly popular, albeit declining, in the US pre-2007.


     

    Apple's share of the worldwide phone market has increased every year since 2007.

  • Reply 85 of 118
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member

    That might be true, but even the analysts that are so reviled around here cite figures to back up their claims.

  • Reply 86 of 118
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by d4NjvRzf View Post

     

    I doubt the OP was referring to a phone that *only* works over WiFi (since that would not be actually a phone but rather a VOIP client). He was more likely referring to something like what the RepublicWireless startup has been doing, which is to let phones make calls over both cellular and WiFi while (ideally) seamlessly transitioning between the two as the user moves about during calls.


    Welcome to iOS 8, carrier support dependent. 

     

    That isn't what I took from his comment...

  • Reply 87 of 118
    jungmarkjungmark Posts: 6,926member
    Amazon has never released numbers so I take whatever Bezos says with a grain of salt.
  • Reply 88 of 118
    maccherrymaccherry Posts: 924member

    TLTL=TOO LITTLE TOO LATE

  • Reply 89 of 118
    retrogustoretrogusto Posts: 1,109member

    A number of people have made good points here, but to me it seems like the phone is necessary to Amazon because they have to keep coming up with new revenue-generating categories since they seem unable to improve the ones they have, which are not significantly profitable. Amazon has microscopic margins, but the stock is very pricey by just about any measure, because they have been able to increase revenues pretty consistently. They have done this by always finding new businesses to get into, and then undercutting the competition by not turning much of a profit. In the short to medium term, they don't "need" to profit because they can demonstrate increased revenues, and investors see a happy day when Amazon has crushed everyone else and can start raising prices with impunity. So you could argue that Amazon is very successful in that sense, even though some quarters they actually do all of that work and end up with less money then when they started.

     

    However, if they stop coming up with new sources of revenue before they figure out a way of being more profitable, investors are going to get scared (perhaps "wake up" is a better term here) and the price is going to drop to a fraction of where it is now, which would be in line with the rest of the market. If Apple were valued in the market with the same optimistic price/earnings ratio, it would be trading above $3,000/share instead of roughly $91.

     

    Right now, Amazon's biggest differentiator in most areas is price, but if they tried to charge more they would quickly be up against stiff competition. So a short- to medium-term solution is to continue to come up with new sources of revenue, but they need to figure out a way of making some money soon.

  • Reply 90 of 118
    bb-15bb-15 Posts: 283member
    Apple's share of the phone market has gone up every year since it came out in 2007.
    It depends on the criteria. Here is what I use.

    1. All smartphones.
    2. Global smartphone OS marketshare.

    * Some measures of iOS worldwide smartphone marketshare;
    - IDC;
    Q1 2014 15.2%
    Q1 2013 17.1%
    Q1 2012 23.0%
    http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp

    - Strategy Analytics;
    Q1 2014 15.3%
    Q1 2013 17.5%
    http://************/2014/04/29/apple-samsung-slip-below-50-in-global-smartphone-marketshare-for-q1-2014/
  • Reply 91 of 118
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by tt92618 View Post

     

    I'll be upfront and say that most of you guys just don't get it; you don't understand why Amazon would build a phone to begin with, and so you try to frame it in terms that you can understand, which is direct competition with Apple.  But Bezos isn't trying to compete with Apple.  Bezos isn't trying to steal Apple's lunch (yet), or even grab the pickle off their burger.

     

    Bezos is optimizing Amazon's business, which is in essence the argument leveled in this piece, minus all the Apple worship.

     

    Kindle is an excellent case in point.  Although just about everyone here is quick to dismiss Kindle tablets, when you look at the real numbers, it's easy to see why Bezos and company think they are a grand idea.  Kindle tablets are estimated to own about 7 - 8% of the market, which is not as insignificant as everyone here would like to imagine.  It is higher, for example, than those guys up in Redmond.  Still it is a number that is obviously no threat to Apple.  But it may interest you to know that this seemingly insignificant 7 - 8 percent number has helped fuel 21% quarterly growth of Amazon's sales of media (video, books, and other content).  So that small 7 - 8 percent market share is driving almost 90% growth YOY of Amazon's content business, which is not at all shabby, and which more than justifies Amazon's approach.  And that business presently accounts for almost 8 billion dollars in annual revenue.  Map that number out with 1 or two years of continued 90% growth and it is not very hard to understand why Amazon is committed to their technology strategy.  Promoting their ecosystem is a huge plus for Amazon's business.



    So against that, the sane question to ask is why wouldn't Amazon want to build a phone?  It is tailor made to drive the company's core business, and that is I might add not a shred different from how Apple uses the halo effect of their hardware to drive other aspects of their business.

     

    FYI, it is estimated that grabbing just 3% of the Android phone market could net Amazon an additional $5 billion in annual revenues.  That's not chump change.

     

    People don't understand how Bezos approaches things; he has a horizon of 5 to 10 years when it comes to business strategy, and it is a core value for him that he is willing to be misunderstood for a very long time, which is essentially what most of you are doing; you misunderstand what Bezos is up to and you all too quickly dismiss it.  



    Amazon has built probably the best cloud services infrastructure in the world, which is quite surprising for a company everyone sees as a retailer.  But to clue you in on how good AWS is, it is the backbone for many successful tech companies, including Netflix, Adobe, Expedia, Pinterest, and more.  As a matter of fact, AWS just won a major CIA contract, and beat out IBM to do it.  Which serves, in many ways, as a testimony.



    Amazon has also built an advertising and data harvesting enterprise that significantly exceeds that of competitors such as Twitter and LinkedIn, and which directly challenges Google in many ways.

     

    Amazon competes directly against Netflix for streaming video, and quite well.

     

    Amazon competes against Google and Apple for video and music content sales.

     

    Amazon is a gargantuan retailer competing against almost everyone.

     

    Amazon just built a payment processing service to compete against Paypal and others.

     

    And I could go on.

     

    My point is that there is a much bigger picture here than simply hawking phones, and I think that most of you laughing about the phone completely miss that very big picture; you don't see the many strategic ways in which selling a phone is a strong plus for Amazon's business, even if it never even comes close to challenging Apple in any way.

     

    Have a nice evening.


    What you said here is essentially no different than the argument Daniel is making in this post. We know the point of the phone is to "drive the company's core business." Daniel says it here: "It's built to address Amazon's needs. It tracks what users might want to buy, tracks users' behavior and preferences in order to drive offers and ads, and it seeks to drive app and media sales through Amazon's store."

     

    So what "big picture" are we missing exactly?

  • Reply 92 of 118
    tt92618 wrote: »
    most of you guys just don't get it; you don't understand why Amazon would build a phone to begin with

    I think Amazon's reasons were explicitly explained by Bezos. There's no mystery. You don't get points for stating the obvious.
    tt92618 wrote: »
    But Bezos isn't trying to compete with Apple.

    That's not true. Amazon wants to build up their digital content business: music, apps, movies, TV shows, eBooks. Google Play and iTunes Store content are tied to competitor platforms. That is where Amazon are competing with Apple (and Google): the content stores.
    tt92618 wrote: »
    My point is that there is a much bigger picture here than simply hawking phones, and I think that most of you laughing about the phone completely miss that very big picture; you don't see the many strategic ways in which selling a phone is a strong plus for Amazon's business, even if it never even comes close to challenging Apple in any way.

    Bigger picture, but you're missing the point of the critics. Just because it is "strategic" doesn't guarantee it will sell well. The critics are predicting that the handset won't sell in large numbers because of Amazon's choice of pricing strategy and feature mix. Who would buy it? For years, we've heard arguments that the premium phone market is saturated in North America, where it is mainly split between iPhone and premium Android handsets. Amazon's pricing put the Fire Phone in the same market, so the only way they can open market share (assuming more people are not entering the premium market) is to take share away from the existing players. (Still think they aren't competing against Apple?) The only way they can sell these and not take away from Apple is if they take away from premium Android handsets, but if sentiment on other tech sites (like Ars Technica) are to be believed, the Fire Phone doesn't appeal to many of them either because its not plugged in to their beloved Google services.
  • Reply 93 of 118
    Dan_DilgerDan_Dilger Posts: 1,583member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by bb-15 View Post



    From the article;

    This is half right.

    - Desktop Windows never established a complete OS "monoculture" because the Mac OS never disappeared. Windows just had a dominant monopoly.

    - And that is what is happening with Google Android and smartphones. Android now has about 79% smartphone OS marketshare.

    But like Windows on the desktop, the Apple alternative has not disappeared.



    As for iOS gaining marketshare since 2007. Sure, that's right since iOS started with zero marketshare in 2007.

     

    Apple's "market share" in personal computers quite obviously never reached very high in the 1980s and then plateaued while the valuable PC market grew rapidly in areas Apple didn't seem to be interested in (or simply failed to attract) like corporate / enterprise use. Apple peaked around 11% of PCs in the early 90s and in ten years was below 2% by 2000. 

     

    Compare that to mobile devices, where Apple started off owning the iPod market, then transitioned to phones in 2007 and immediately grabbed 1% of the total phone market (not smartphones, all mobiles). In 2008, 09 and 2010 Android fans kept saying Apple would lose out to commodity producers, but that never happened. Apple keeps rolling out the most popular phone and its sales keep beating everyone else.

     

    The only competition Apple has now is Samsung, and the majority of Samsung's phone sales are profitless, which is why it can sell 2x as many phones and yet only make 1/2 what Apple does. That's absolutely terrible. HP and Dell weren't making half of Apple's profits selling 2x the PCs. They were selling many times more PCs and earning (along with Microsoft) the vast majority of PC profits. Today, Google is making nothing from Android. It gives mobile ad revenue to hardware makers to get them to use Google's version of Android.

     

    So no, it's not anything like the 1990s. It's been 7 years and Apple has taken larger and larger bites out of the global phone market and earns virtually all the money in the industry. Samsung is struggling in comparison, and everyone else is losing tons of money. 

  • Reply 94 of 118
    Dan_DilgerDan_Dilger Posts: 1,583member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by woodbine View Post

     

    on what planet is an iPod a better e-reader than the kindle?


     

    On the planet where tens of millions of consumers bought iPod touch and didn't buy Kindles. 

     

    Note that Amazon has an iOS Kindle app, but Apple doesn't have iBooks app for Kindle. Think about why that is. 

  • Reply 95 of 118
    "According to Google's Android ideology, once intellectual property rights are dissolved and the means of production are collectively owned by a benevolent "Do No Evil" corporation, we'll be living in an Android communist paradise where every member of the proletariat can own a low priced smartphone subsidized by adware fed to us by Mother Google."

    Love it. The way Daniel expresses himself and his language are a delight. I think I grinned all the way through this article.
  • Reply 96 of 118
    Dan_DilgerDan_Dilger Posts: 1,583member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Crowley View Post

     

    If Apple's own numbers are reliable, then it looks like it's probably more like Amazon sell 2-3 times as many as Apple: http://gigaom.com/2013/06/12/apple-we-have-20-percent-of-the-u-s-ebook-market/

     

    I'd still say that douses the idea that the iPad is the iPod of the ebooks market pretty thoroughly.


     

    The fact that you have to reference a contrived "ebook market," pared with the fact that Amazon shifted its focus from e-ink Kindles to LCD Fire tablets after sales of iPads grew while e-ink book readers went nowhere, should help answer your questions. 

     

    Amazon's Kindle isn't an "iPod" of anything because iPod denotes a hit product that makes money, not a hobby that contributes some revenues toward paying for its development. If you want to call Kindle the "Apple TV of books," then knock yourself out. 

  • Reply 97 of 118
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Corrections View Post

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by woodbine View Post

     

    on what planet is an iPod a better e-reader than the kindle?


     

    On the planet where tens of millions of consumers bought iPod touch and didn't buy Kindles. 

     

    Note that Amazon has an iOS Kindle app, but Apple doesn't have iBooks app for Kindle. Think about why that is. 


     

    Wow, that's some major league delusion there.  The iPod Touch is a better ereader than a Kindle?  Are you listening to yourself?

     

    Just no.

     

    And regarding your second question, which you seem to be gearing towards an "Apple is winning" answer, that'll also be a no.  the answer is that's how they work, Amazon is a company that wants to sell content to everyone, and makes their own devices to increase the available market, and Apple is a company that wants to use content to increase the value of their devices.

  • Reply 98 of 118
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Corrections View Post

     

     

    The fact that you have to reference a contrived "ebook market," pared with the fact that Amazon shifted its focus from e-ink Kindles to LCD Fire tablets after sales of iPads grew while e-ink book readers went nowhere, should help answer your questions. 

     

    Amazon's Kindle isn't an "iPod" of anything because iPod denotes a hit product that makes money, not a hobby that contributes some revenues toward paying for its development. If you want to call Kindle the "Apple TV of books," then knock yourself out. 


    First of all, the "contrived book market" I'm referencing is referenced by Keith Moerer from Apple in the link.  If Apple considers it to be the market, I'll go along with that.

     

    Secondly, you made up thi s"iPod of" nonsense, not me, and no, I don't think it clearly denotes what you say it denotes.  I'd say it could equally denote a brand ubiquitous in it's market, akin to Hoover or Xerox.  And in that definition, the Kindle is probably the closest thing to the iPod of ebooks that there is.  That's what I went with, because you didn't define your terms; if that's not what you meant then fine.

  • Reply 99 of 118
    On the planet where tens of millions of consumers bought iPod touch and didn't buy Kindles. 

    Note that Amazon has an iOS Kindle app, but Apple doesn't have iBooks app for Kindle. Think about why that is. 
    So you're seriously telling us that the majority of people who bought an iPod Touch did so solely for the reading experience alone? Sorry Corrections but I don't believe that's the case. They bought them for a multitude of reasons but "Reading on a (at the time) 3.5 inch screen" I highly doubt was one of them.

    The e-ink Kindle provides a far-better reading experience, at least in my opinion, than an iPod Touch does. I can take it outside on a sunny day and not have to worry about the glare of taking a device such as the iPod-Phone-Pad-Android tablets-Microsoft crap. It's far easier on my eyes than any other device.

    Again, this is just my experience.
  • Reply 100 of 118
    pmcdpmcd Posts: 396member

    {A collection of snarky snippets.}

    What's so hard to understand about a device that is largely WiFi based but can make use of those expensive cell towers if needs be.? You seem to think cell and wifi technology are new. It is very old science.

    I use both the iPad Mini and the Fire HDX every day. I prefer the feel of the HDX. Do you have a problem with someone having a preference?

    I am not attacking Apple. I am simply saying I find them less interesting than I have at any point going back to the 70's.

    philip
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