“CEO of Cyanogen Kirt McMaster’s company has recently partnered with Qualcomm, the company that makes the chips inside just about every non-iPhone. The deal sees Qualcomm offering manufacturers the use of the Cyanogen software with any device that uses their chips, making it easy for any new brand to come into the market,” Harry Tucker reports for News.com.au. “This ‘turnkey’ style deal is what Mr McMaster believes will be the downfall of big manufacturers like Samsung.”
The tier one OEMs like Samsung are going to be the next generation Nokias in the next five years. They’re going to be slaughtered. We think long term Apple itself will have problems because they’re just not good at competing at the low end… It could get pretty bad pretty damn quick [for Samsung]. This is often the case. Look what happened to Research In Motion. Look what happened to Nokia. Last summer Micromax surpassed Samsung as the dominant feature phone player in India. We’re talking literally in eight months this occurred. — Cyanogen CEO Kirt McMaster
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Cyanogen’s CEO needs to take a course on demographics. Apple’s iPhone isn’t affected by low-end cheapo Android junk. Apple’s iPhone has already cornered the market in the only metric that matters: Quality customers. Chinese or Korean shitset maker of the week can amass all of the junk market that they want. Apple doesn’t care. McMaster should rein in his hubris regarding Apple; he sounds silly.
Samsung, on the other hand, can easily be usurped as the world’s highest volume maker of handsets for little or no profit by the next Apple patent- and trade-dress-infringing iPhone knockoff peddler(s).
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Glenn Holland” for the heads up.]
sounds great, so more low end competitors fighting over razor thin margins; recipe for even more failures.
As for “Apple inc. not being good at the low end” crap; has this guy been living under a bush: Apple inc. go to where customers value the experience and are willing to pay for it; oh yes, that’s where all the profits are!!
Absolutely, Apple already has 89% of the smart phone profits, the rest of the vast herd is squabbling over 11% scraps. I have never seen Apple make any kind of move to enter that meager cutthroat market, nor any indication they were even interested in the slightest. Trying to corner that crappy little market would not earn them anything other than headaches.
Yet again they fail to understand. The market share of easy come and easy go will force more people to Apple. When software and supporting hardware all need to tied together. This short sighted vision is so low end as the hardware that it will produce. How do these people ever get a stage or soap box to stand on!
Won’t this simply fragment Android OS even more? Consumers are going to get pretty confused about what to buy in terms of Android hardware if even more smartphone vendors come into the market. Who’s going to be responsible for updating all these Cyanogen smartphones. I don’t think Google will be interested in supporting them if it would rather work with its own Nexus lineup. It would seem like to be more of a headache for carriers, too. They’re really forking the hell out of Android and I’m not exactly sure how this is good for the end user. Can these newer, smaller companies provide proper support to customers?
I’m not aware of any third party smartphone vendor being interested in either providing assistance in upgrading, or otherwise supporting their product. This is a low profit/no profit environment where OEMs hope to corner the market with enough market share so that they can start increasing prices down the road, a traditional monopolist buy-in approach.
“… forking the hell out of Android… ” is the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Let’s all commit to making it a popular phrase!
Regarding the article’s author, Harry Tucker: His editor (Daniel Sankey), who is too much of a coward to post an email address on the news.com.au website, does have a Twitter account: @Daniel_Sankey
I’d suggest letting Mr. Sankey know what an embarrassment to his organization Mr. Tucker is as a so-called “tech journalist”. How can anyone who calls himself a technology journalist not know that Apple have never been interested in racing to the bottom to fight for low-margin scraps in the market? Mr. Tucker’s “interview” was nothing more than a platform for the Cyanogen’s CEO to plug his product, with absolutely no follow-up or challenging questions from the so-called “journalist” — who clearly knows nothing of the business world, either. This is precisely the reason that journalists are regarded at the same untrustworthy, low level as used car salesmen.
Wait; perhaps I’ve been too harsh. At least the person selling used cars KNOWS that s/he is lying!
I’ve come to the conclusion that fragmentation of Android is not an issue for a large segment of Android phones and their customers. Why? Because those ultra-low-end Android phones are treated as today’s “feature phones.” It comes with a version of the OS (with built-in apps) that never gets upgraded for the life of the product. Customers only use what comes on the phone, and do not install apps (either because they can’t or don’t want to). What you buy is what you get, forever. Sounds like an old-school feature phone to me… 😉
Kirt McMaster as Yugo CEO: “BMW, Mercedes, et al, They’re going to be slaughtered. We think long term, they will have problems because, they’re just not good at competing at the low end. We’re talking literally in eight months… It could get pretty bad pretty damn quick” ….Not!
Yugo! Bwahahahahahaha!
Yugo.
Yugo Girl!
Yes because the low end of the market has worked out so well for everyone chasing minimal, often not life sustaining, profits.
Apple is a premium brand and therein lies the attraction to the world’s best customers. Cheap versions of anything Apple need not bother or apply nor are they being asked for. How anyone can be a CEO and bereft of the skill of differentiating market competitors and why they are successful is beyond me. It’s the business reasoning equivalent of hokum, superstition and antiquated economic concepts.
Apple doesn’t sell cheap iPhones, an doesn’t have a problem with those that sell cheap smartphones. Apple does have an ongoing problem with cheap analysts. 😀
I hope slamdung gets slaughtered soon.
Samsung
and
Slaughter.
Two words that go together…
Like gash and vinegar.
Like hemorrhoids and buldak (Korean fire chicken).
Like nuked and fallout.
Like nausea and putrescine.
(please join in!)
Samsung and..
Slaughter
S. laughter
Samsung laughter
Samsung tears
Would this be similar to how:
– Apple got destroyed by netbooks
– Apple got destroyed by cheap PCs
– the iPhone got destroyed by all the current cheap Androcrap phones
?
Agree, Apple doesn’t get the largest market share, but, they get the largest profit share. 😀
Asinine:
We think long term Apple itself will have problems because they’re just not good at competing at the low end
Since when has Apple ever BOTHERED to dump junkware into the low end? To Apple, there is no such thing as ‘low end’. There’s just the quality end. Let’s quote Tim Cook on the matter:
There’s always a large junk part of the market. We’re not in the junk business. The upper end of the industry justifies its higher prices with greater value. There’s a segment of the market that really wants a product that does a lot for them, and I want to compete like crazy for those customers. I’m not going to lose sleep over that other market, because it’s just not who we are.
When will the low end tech journalists learn?
… Or in this case, oblivious low end CEOs. 😕
And junk tech journalists. 😀
When will the low end journalists learn? Never! 😀
Seems everyone has forgotten how well Apple did with the iPod, and crushing and dominating the low-end in that market.
If anything, the R&D consequences of Watch will allow Apple to leverage new iOS devices that will allow them to start moving into the lower end. Review the iPod roadmap.
Cyanogen should be worried, if anything.
These low-end guys still don’t get it. Most consumers do not desire throwaway smartphones that don’t run the most popular apps, don’t receive timely security updates, don’t operate properly after six months, don’t have customer support, and don’t fully synch with other devices.
Today, many in the world are ready to purchase their second, third or fourth smartphone and desire devices “that just work”. These people are going to continue to take their smartphone training wheels off and invest in the real thing: the iPhone.
Look what happened to Research In Motion. Look what happened to Nokia.
I think Nokia was a very good low level player and RIM were just Lazy and Overconfident with their one trick pony.
Who the hell is cyanogen to be talking so big?
They provide a customized version of Android.
They are trying to become a company by selling their software to low end hardware manufacturers in India.