Macbashing Face it, the iPhone isn't the success you were expecting. - And what of it?
| Face it, the iPhone isn't the success you were expecting. - And what of it? |
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| Written by L. M. Lloyd | ||||||||||
| Friday, 13 March 2009 15:18 | ||||||||||
Page 2 of 4 Now I can already hear the million voices claiming that going from nothing to 8% of the market is a huge success in two years. Unfortunately it really isn't, because the iPhone is easily the most marketed device I have seen in my entire life. Sure, maybe during the height of the cola wars of the '80s, maybe Coke and Pepsi blanketed the airwaves with as many commercials as Apple does, but I have never seen so pervasive a unilateral ad campaign for a single product that wasn't Levis 501 jeans! One day there were no specific ads for specific phones other than what carriers ran to advertise their exclusive phone of the week, and the next day every commercial break, on every channel, at all times of day had an iPhone ad, with no other ads for any other phones opposing them… for two years! It appeared in product placements in everything from science fiction shows to romantic comedies. Everywhere you look, for the past two years, if there is a phone on TV or in a movie, it is an iPhone. And that is only talking about the paid advertisement! Every news show, every magazine, every blog, and even every newspaper ran stories about how the device would change the entire world and revolutionize communication as we know it, before it even came out. When it finally did come out, it was the lead story on every newscast in America. It was, and still is, a campaign that dwarfs even Sony's original Playstation campaign, and can only be rivaled in the tech world, for sheer pervasiveness, by perhaps Microsoft's various Windows campaigns. Yet where Sony's Playstation campaign got them 75% of the game market in their day, and Microsoft's campaigns maintains their 90-something% of the computer market, Apple's unprecedented iPhone campaign has earned them 8% of the smartphone market, or to put it another way, just under 1% of the general phone market. Now as any marketing professional will tell you, if you are spending ten times as much on advertising as your competitors, but are still unable to sell even half as many units, you would be foolish to call that a success. As a matter of fact, Apple is quickly becoming a case study in how advertising might not beas effective as people assume it is. They have been banging the drum very loudly for years now on several of their products, and with the exception of the once in a lifetime sucess of the iPod, none of their products have managed to move out of thier niche market, and into the mainstream.
Is there some point to this, or are you just looking for another excuse to hate on Apple? Why should anyone care about market share? BMW doesn't have the highest market share, but they are widely regarded as making the best cars! In fact, there is a very important point here, you weird disturbing little rhetorical device. The point is, developers and content providers are chasing the iPhone as though it is the new growth platform of the new century, when there are several other platforms they ignore, even though those platforms represent larger potential markets. You see, when you are approaching a development platform, if you are going to think about it as a car, then you need to think about it as someone making spare parts, not someone looking to buy a car. You might really like your BMW, but you are really going to be better off making parts for the Toyotas and Hondas of the world. The fact is that when devoting development resources, the market share of the target platform really does, or at least should, matter. Unfortunately, I can go on with these facts and figures until I am blue in the face, and it won't stop a single developer from chasing the iPhone, or make them stop ignoring Symbian, BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile. They will keep pouring their resources into developing for that 8% of the market using the iPhone, because Apple has once again pulled a neat little trick, which is to redefine what success means, so that they can claim to have achieved it.
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 19 March 2009 18:54 ) | ||||||||||