“As Apple Inc. prepares to release its much-heralded smartwatch, rival gadget makers are racing to upgrade their own devices to ward off market-share losses,” Olga Kharif reports for Bloomberg.
“With Apple expected to commandeer sales among its iOS-using crowd, the competition for Android users is heating up,” Kharif reports. “Withings Inc., maker of the Activité watches that work with iOS phones, is releasing new software this week that will make the devices compatible with Android phones. Rival Pebble debuted a new watch last week, while Motorola is pouring money into its Moto 360, a watch based on Google Inc.’s Android Wear operating system.”
MacDailyNews Take: It figures that Lenovo (Motorola) is pouring money into a stupidwatch that’s the wrong shape. Lists works on square displays, not round.
“‘We intend to continue to spend heavily in this space,’ Rick Osterloh, president of Motorola Mobility, said in an interview,” Kharif reports. “While the smartwatch market is relatively tiny — at $130 million last year in developed countries, according to Analysys Mason — Apple could catapult the business as it did in the mobile and music industries with its ubiquitous iPhone and iPod. Sales of smartwatches this year may surge 28-fold to $3.6 billion, said Enrique Velasco-Castillo, an analyst in London at Analysys Mason. Apple will rapidly gain dominance, he said.”
Read more in the full article here.
Rick Osterloh is looking at recent history and noticing that when Apple enters a new market, the business catapults. He seems not to have noticed which company makes nearly all the profits when that business catapults and how poorly all the other manufacturers do.
Apple is offering manufacturers an opportunity to throw more money away, just as manufacturers not named Apple did with music players, ultra books, phones and tablets. The bizarre thing is that there is no shortage on companies yet again lining up to do exactly that.
Blackberry actually had its best years *after* the iPhone was released, because Apple made everybody realize they really did want a smart phone instead of the “feature” phone so many had. And Blackbery got its share of those people. The same may well happen with watches…for a little while.
Yep, a rising tide lifts all boats, then the iPhone tsunami washed them all away.
“By mid 2016, Apple will have 15-20% of the market.”
I see no way possible for the competition smart watches to have acquired that much of the market. This is a replay of iPhone: Apple swoops in, immediately picks up about 90-95% of the market, Samsung duplicates what Apple did using Android, and whittles away at that market. Finally, Judge Koh rules that even though Samsung’s watch looks and behaves identically to Apple’s, no copyright infringement has occurred.
^^ patent infringement.
Android watch roadkill.