“Steve Jobs’s solution to Google’s Android-everywhere strategy was simple and audacious: he unveiled the iPad,” Fred Vogelstein reports for Wired. “Many knew Jobs was going to unveil a tablet despite what he had told Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal seven years before. ‘It turns out people want keyboards… We look at the tablet and we think it is going to fail,’ Jobs had said.”
“But he’d clearly reconsidered this. If Google was going to try to win the mobile-platform war on breadth, Jobs was going to win it on depth,” Vogelstein reports. “Maybe more people in the world would own Android phones than iPhones. But the people who owned iPhones would also own iPads, iPod Touches, and a slew of other Apple products that all ran the same software, that all connected to the same online store, and that all generated much bigger profits for everyone involved. Only someone with the self-confidence of Jobs would have the guts to set such a high bar.”
Vogelstein reports, “The Android team at Google scrambled to keep up with the relentless pace of Apple’s innovations. But in 2011 they were being outflanked on almost every front. Yes, there were more Android devices in use than iPhones or iPads combined. But platform size was turning out to be just one, not the only, measurement of dominance in the Apple/Google fight. With the iPhone and the iPad, Apple still had the coolest, most cutting-edge devices. It had the best content for those devices. It had the easiest-to-use software. And it had the best platform for making content owners and software developers money. On top of all that, the iPad was also upending the personal computer business.”
Tons more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: We see those on Android – disconnected, incompatible, nothing much in sync, a growing malware problem, tremendous fragmentation, second-rate (and worse) apps, blown up phone apps on their tablets – and we pity them.
But, it doesn’t really matter for Apple, these aren’t the customers they’re looking for.
More than enough customers of quality, ease and richness of development, and ecosystem strength trumps platform size every time.
Related articles:
Newsflash: Apple sells premium products at premium prices to premium customers – October 23, 2012
Why I’ll be buying an Apple iPad – along with millions of others – January 27, 2010