The Coming Battle
(based on a piece in the Huff Post) A new survey by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), in both China and America, showed that Windows easily outpaced iOS, MIcrosoft has a great opportunity, its own fanbase!
John Rose, one of the lead authors of the report, told HuffPost that this was not bad news for Cupertino. Rather he3 sees a vast untapped tablet market. “You can look at the chart and think it’s time to sell Apple stock,but really it’s new demand. … The introduction of a Windows tablet would be market-expanding as opposed to share-shifting. The volume [of tablets in America] will continue to grow, and it’s hard to imagine that the Windows platform…will crush the iOS trajectory.”
“Think of smartphones with Android and iOS,” Rose explained. “The U.S. market shares of Android versus iOS crossed 8 to 9 months ago, but from a pure shipment perspective — it really hasn’t harmed Apple’s sales at all.”
While I agree (humbly) with Rose, it is important to note that the survey came before the announcement of the Kindle Fire. The Fire is already (on pre orders) selling well. Moreover, it seems to me that the Fire, with its tight integration with the Cloud and with Amazon as a Marketplace, defines something quote different from the iPad. The the Fire’s features aim the device squarely at the gadget collectors, media consumers, and couch potatoes who want their tablet toi turn on the TV, show the morning news, and sell them the latest magazines and music … the same market that Apple needs to grow. .. Even the price, $199, is a game changer. At $199, people may want Fires by the couch (integrated with their TV), in their kitchen (integrated with their microwave) and in their bathrooms (integrated with their toothbruash).
Microsoft’s tablet may have a very different market, one Apple can not reach. Actually, Redmond has two markets that Apple and Fire can not serve. The first is the workplace. Adobe has already announced that it is porting Creative Suite to Android. While we can expect an iPad version, Adobe’s obvious market is the Windows tablet in
corporations.That is Redmond’s home turf. The other market is one Steve (Balmer) built … the X box/Kinect as home theatre. A Windows Tablet integrated with the X Box would be a natural replacement for the set top box. Apple would have to buy SONY to be competitive. SONY just bought the film rights to Steve Jobs’ official biography. Imagine Jobs emerging as the Apple-Sony version of Disney’s Mickey!
There is another market worth considering here … education. Apple’s marketing to students is amazing, but …. students are tied to book stores and Amazon (and the Fire) may well kill off the huge chain of Barnes and Noble owned and managed book stores. I can see Amazon bundling Fire with eTexts. This is another world where Amazon has a huge advantage over Cupertino.
The Jedi knight in this mix may well be Google. Google can compete toe to toe with Microsoft in several ways … Google’s Motorola already has the lion’s share of the set top box market. Google has an underdeveloped online marketplace that could rival Amazon .. at least for books, music, and magazines. Google’s Google Docs is the only real competition with Microsoft for the Office space. Finally Google’s Motorola brand has a record of introducing cool hardware . especially cell phones, that rivals Apples’s and is not dependent on Steve Jobs’ performances.