“I have been speaking with various vendors of tablets lately and more then once, the topic of Apple ‘iPodding’ them has come up,” Tim Bajarin writes for Tech.pinons. “iPodding basically refers to the fact that although Apple has had the iPod on the market for over 10 years now, they still have over 70% of the MP3 portable digital music player market. This fact is giving many of the tablet vendors nightmares. Although they see this tablet market as a very large one and believe there is room for multiple tablet vendors given the potential market size and potential world wide demand, they know very well that Apple has done a great job in cornering the MP3 player market with iPods and are afraid that Apple could do the same with tablets.”
“While all of them think that they can compete with Apple when it comes to hardware, and maybe even software, what they all pretty much know is that the secret to Apple success is that they have built their hardware and software around an integrated ecosystem based on a very powerful platform,” Bajarin writes. “And it is here where their confidence level lags and the ‘iPodding’ fears raise its head. And to be honest, this should really concern them.”
Bajarin writes, “Apple is in a most unique position in which they own the hardware, software and services and have built all of these around their eco-system platform. That means that when Apple engineers start designing a product, the center of its design is the platform. For most of Apple competitors, it is the reverse; the center of their design is the device itself, and then they look for apps and services that work with their device in hopes that this combination will attract new customers. In the end, this is Apple major advantage over their competitors and they can ride this platform in all kinds of directions… We will see this same concept repeated when they eventually release anything for the TV.”
Read more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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