“Within three years of Steve Jobs’ return to Apple in 1996, he transformed the then-struggling company into an innovation machine capable of consistently stealing attention from the rest of the industry. This year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas suffered at least its fifteenth year of being upstaged by Apple,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider.
“Apple’s ability to consistently overshadow everyone else at CES over the past 15 years offers clear insight into how the company’s transformation occured, but also offers advice to struggling, smaller rivals; highlights the problems inherent in broadly licensed platforms (like Windows and Android) and provides some clues of how the consumer electronics industry will play out into the future,” Dilger writes. “Conveniently, Apple’s 15 years of overshadowing CES begins with a decade of the company’s successfully stealing the show from Microsoft, followed by the most recent five years of whipping Google and its Android partners (particularly Samsung), which have collectively inherited Microsoft’s role at CES.”
“Going forward, Apple’s largest potential threat appears to be the risk of internal failure, getting sidetracked or distracted away from its core values by too much self-assuredness,” Dilger writes. “With Samsung on the ropes and Google failing to really turn things around, Apple appears to have little real external competition going into 2015, allowing the company to rapidly expand and build upon its existing successes.”
Full history in the complete article here.
Android has proven to be a very popular, but highly unprofitable distraction. No high valued customers choose Android over iPhone in significant numbers, it’s a settler’s platform full of cheapskates and those that cannot afford the higher quality and more secure iPhone.
The other Android platforms such as tablets have some customers but no real ecosystem of quality Apps. Android tablet Apps are just blown up phone Apps.
Android lacks the quality, the security, and the integration that Apple has achieved.
Apple’s biggest issue right now is the quality and fit and finish of its software, which has been lax of late. Siri took a long time to catch up to Google, and it still lags in some areas. It’s known by name, Apple should have put a lot more time, money, and effort into it long ago.
Maps needs a lot of work, directions are often a mess, especially walking directions. But driving directions lack basic features. Why can’t I route around traffic? Why can’t I elect not to take freeways? Why can’t I plan a route to hit more than one location?
Apple may be better that the competition, but they have a long ways to go in my view.
Agreed with Twimoon1 above. Erg. I had to do some work on a Mac that was outside my normal, rather limited set-up for work… and holy smokes I could have imagined myself being on XP! This was iPhoto, the Finder, Mail together.