“I see customer creation as causal to the other desirable outcomes and is therefore the more important priority,” Horace Dediu writes for Asymco. “And this is why, whenever possible, I try to deduce how well a company is performing on this metric.”
“The greatest companies (by market capitalization) today are certainly examples of achievement in customer creation,” Dediu writes. “Facebook, Microsoft and Google are members of the ‘billion user club’ or companies that crossed a billion active users.”
“But do they really have a billion customers?” Dediu writes. “Apple does not offer a figure on its specific user count, but we have some viable proxies: iCloud accounts reached 782 million in February 2016; iTunes accounts reached 885 million in September 2014; Active devices reached one billion in January 2016. That number is likely above 1.1 billion now.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take:
Twitter is shutting down 225,000 Islamic Psycho accounts. Who knows what a real account is?
They aren’t Apple Customers. This phrase has been shortened to simply Apple. This is keeping with Angelo Airhardt’s shortening of Apple Store to “Apple.”
You are Apple. I am Apple. We are all Apple.
Only Apple.
You are an idiot.
One can ignore the counts on iCloud or iTunes or Apple Music — they are just buttons that everyone seems to hit when they first buy an iPhone. If it’s free, people will sign up for absolutely anything. After that, the percentage of users who actually follow through and use it for the long run are very small percentage of in-service devices.
Only Apple knows, but they certainly aren’t bragging about real usage rates.
Apple’s products are desirable and they sell. Once they are bought, customers are satisfied. Thus, they are inclined to buy from Apple next time round. That’s a successful business model in action, so successful that both the products and the model have been copied. This is a good thing. Apple deserves credit for raising the bar. Hate Apple if you must but try to afford them some credit for raising the bar—before them, retail electronics were godawful.