“With the iPhone released and selling like hot cakes across the nation, people are speculating excitedly over how many units Apple and AT&T have actually sold to date. One group of people who’s speculating over that not so excitedly is Microsoft, who from day 1 since the iPhone’s announcement in January have shown tremendous fear — but not on the surface,” Carl Howe writes for Blackfriars’ Marketing.
“It all started with Steve Ballmer’s response to the iPhone on CNBC-TV [back in January],” Howe writes.
Howe then deconstructs the following video in which Microsoft CEO Ballmer laughs at Apple iPhone:
Howe writes, “What’s really telling of Ballmer’s response is his typically somewhat-nervous laugh: as CEO of Microsoft, he knew best of all people how serious a threat the iPhone was to them… Ballmer states ‘[Microsoft] is selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year, Apple is selling zero phones a year’ (remember, this was January 17th). Millions and millions and millions — that sounds about right, given Microsoft’s roughly 0.4% market share in the worldwide cellphone industry.”
“Microsoft has about 5.6% market share in smartphones, which is a mere 6-7% slice of the overall cellphone industry. Translation: they sold about 4 million cellphones running Windows Mobile (any version) in 2006… It’s fairly safe to say that there are only, in total, no more than 7 million Windows Mobile phones in the world,” Howe explains. “Apple’s stated 10 million goal seems a lot more aggressive already.”
How writes, “Yet, the real kicker is what the iPhone really is: a fierce attack on many industries, companies and platforms. Above all, though, the iPhone is an attack on proprietary formats, one of Microsoft’s core competencies.”
The iPhone attacks:
• The cellphone industry at large.
• Companies ranging from carriers to handset makers to OS makers to Opera.
• Proprietary codecs.
Howe explains that Apple’s iPhone is “also the first real threat to Microsoft from a desktop point of view: Linux-based cellphones (about 17% of all smartphones) weren’t really convincing people to leave Windows behind and switch to Linux, but the iPhone may very well convince people to switch to a Mac.”
Full article – very highly recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “MacVicta” for the heads up.]
Howe concisely nails many points in his excellent article. Please click through and read his full article.