I recently read an article on Engadget about how Apple is removing protective screens from their store. There's a lot of sinister comments about how Apple is probably going to be making a competing product, or they are "censoring" products now... but I think the reality is much simpler; they are ugly. End of story.
How many times as one of your iPhone/Touch friends came up to you and said, "Hey, check out my new ultra kool iPhone...", and then they proceed to hand you a condom wrapped device with the plastic screen protector starting to fall off, or chipped around the edges.... Yeah... we've all been there. And then when you pull out your Nexus One and show them, they give you this look like... "Well, try to imagine mine without the condom and screen protector that's starting to peel away... mine would look way cooler than yours then..."
Bottom line, is that Steve doesn't believe the iphone should be wrapped in condoms, duct tape, electrical tape, or plastic screen things. The iPhone probably does look cool without all those things... but good luck finding one.
Everytime I see people holding an iPhone wrapped in some awful wrapping, I imagine that if I walked into their livingroom, I'd probably find that their furniture draped in large plastic coverings....
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
My App Store is Bigger Than Yours...
Really people, is this what it's come down to. It seems that every few days I see a blog posting that heralds Apple because they have 140K+ apps, followed by, "oh and Android has a pitiful 20K+ apps".
What's the obsession with this comparison. Let's face it, once your get past the first 1000 apps, you really don't have much left for comparisons. How many calculators, twitter clients, flashlights, farts, etc, do we need? I mean, using the # of apps as a success metric, would indicate that the Apple Mac OSX is basically a failure. I mean windows has far more apps for the desktop than Apple, so, we must conclude that Apple has failed on the desktop, and should just fold up shop now. The reality, is the Apple's desktop is probably just a strong as Windows, since again, after we get past the first several hundred apps... the rest really don't do much to attract a person to one OS vs the other.
It seems that this obsession with App numbers goes even deeper making intelligent people making statements like... "Apple can't help but to succeed with the ipad... when it releases, it will have 140K+ apps at its disposal". I had someone say those exact words to me. My comment was, "Oh, so OSX doesn't have 140K apps". Let's face it, OSX has more than 140K apps, so it would make more sense for Apple to install OSX on a tablet to gain access to the millions of applications available on OSX. But wait, that would mean that Apple couldn't control what you do with the device, and they could install applications from other sources, other than Apple. That's not good for Apple.
I don't think that anyone is going to disagree that the iphone has more apps. I have an ipod touch and an android phone. I've installed about 20 apps on each, and beyond that, I can't say there's much more that really interests me. Everyone is different, so chances are you are going to have a different set of 20 apps, but I'm willing to bet that even in those 20, we are going to have some overlap.
The number of apps in the store is a good marketing metric, but it doesn't indicate a useful measure of applications. I've had people say that "free apps" are useless because they are free. You do realize that the difference in 95% of the cases between a free app and a paid one... is the price. I mean, in most cases, it's still some poor smuck writing the application in his/her spare time after work. One person decides to give it away (like doing charity) and the other person decides to charge 99 cents.
I think a better metric is to look at metrics like month over month growth, and return rates, etc, but you don't see a lot of that happening.
So, the next time you hear yourself croaking out the 140K stat about the Apple App Store, just ask yourself, is that a relevant statistic in your argument.
What's the obsession with this comparison. Let's face it, once your get past the first 1000 apps, you really don't have much left for comparisons. How many calculators, twitter clients, flashlights, farts, etc, do we need? I mean, using the # of apps as a success metric, would indicate that the Apple Mac OSX is basically a failure. I mean windows has far more apps for the desktop than Apple, so, we must conclude that Apple has failed on the desktop, and should just fold up shop now. The reality, is the Apple's desktop is probably just a strong as Windows, since again, after we get past the first several hundred apps... the rest really don't do much to attract a person to one OS vs the other.
It seems that this obsession with App numbers goes even deeper making intelligent people making statements like... "Apple can't help but to succeed with the ipad... when it releases, it will have 140K+ apps at its disposal". I had someone say those exact words to me. My comment was, "Oh, so OSX doesn't have 140K apps". Let's face it, OSX has more than 140K apps, so it would make more sense for Apple to install OSX on a tablet to gain access to the millions of applications available on OSX. But wait, that would mean that Apple couldn't control what you do with the device, and they could install applications from other sources, other than Apple. That's not good for Apple.
I don't think that anyone is going to disagree that the iphone has more apps. I have an ipod touch and an android phone. I've installed about 20 apps on each, and beyond that, I can't say there's much more that really interests me. Everyone is different, so chances are you are going to have a different set of 20 apps, but I'm willing to bet that even in those 20, we are going to have some overlap.
The number of apps in the store is a good marketing metric, but it doesn't indicate a useful measure of applications. I've had people say that "free apps" are useless because they are free. You do realize that the difference in 95% of the cases between a free app and a paid one... is the price. I mean, in most cases, it's still some poor smuck writing the application in his/her spare time after work. One person decides to give it away (like doing charity) and the other person decides to charge 99 cents.
I think a better metric is to look at metrics like month over month growth, and return rates, etc, but you don't see a lot of that happening.
So, the next time you hear yourself croaking out the 140K stat about the Apple App Store, just ask yourself, is that a relevant statistic in your argument.
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