“The Apple iPad is not going to be the company’s next runaway best seller,” John C. Dvorak writes for MarketWatch. “Not if the industry can help it.”
MacDailyNews Take: What industry? The one that for about a decade so far has been taking a Microsoft OS that’s not suited for tablets or touch, but cramming it into ugly, heavy, inefficient hardware resulting in anemic, laughable sales? Steve Jobs must be cowering in fear.
Dvorak continues, “What is most galling to the tech industry is a company coming along within an existing sub-segment of the market, such as MP3 players, and showing up all the established manufacturers and then taking over the market. What is more galling is doing it without underhanded business practices designed to somehow lockout or screw the competitors. Apple has done it by shrewd marketing and the wise use of industrial design and stunning user interfaces.”
“In the process it has humiliated Sony Corp., Samsung, Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp., Microsoft Corp., Panasonic Corp., Ericsson, and dozens of other flat-footed companies in both the MP3 world and the smartphone arena,” Dvorak writes. “It went on to embarrass every single record label and music distributor with its iTunes, too.”
“It’s now trying to humiliate everyone and anyone who ever tried to push a tablet computer and I sense that this time the industry is not going to be taken to the woodshed any more for the Apple spanking,” Dvorak writes.
MacDailyNews Take: “The industry,” as Dvorak himself points out, didn’t want to be taken to the woodshed in MP3 players, online content services, and smartphones, not to mention high-end notebooks, yet in the woodshed they sit. Dvorak’s “logic” as we understand it is: “The industry” was mad about iPod and iTunes, and then really mad about iPhone, but now they’re really, really mad, so, uh… you know, this time it’ll be different. As usual, J.D.’s not making his case very well.
Dvorak continues, “This scenario comes to mind because on Monday, at the Mobile World Conference and CEO junket in Barcelona, Intel and Nokia are expected to make a partnership announcement. Everyone assumes it’s headed in the direction of more mobile computers from Nokia… Nokia is now fooling around with Netbooks and could easily develop an e-reader or iPad-like device with Intel.”
Full article – Think Before You Click™ – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Okay, so the company who can’t make fast and efficient portable chips, who routinely gets its ass handed to it by ARM, is going to team up with a cellphone maker known primarily for basic candybar phones, its inability to penetrate the lucrative North American market, and for rapidly losing market share to Apple and, for God’s sake, RIM, is going to “easily” develop an iPad-like device?
As usual, Dvorak doesn’t understand the blood, sweat, and tears that Apple puts into R&D and demeans them by trivializing what it would really take to catch them. That Dvorak seems not to realize that a vibrant, rapidly-growing ecosystem is already in place and just waiting for iPad to hit the streets is inexcusable for someone who’s supposed to be covering tech issues, regardless of his “cranky geek” schtick.
Dvorak is right about one thing: Apple has embarrassed many, many companies, but as is often his wont, he fails provide any convincing evidence that this time around it’ll be any different.
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