The Globe references an article published by TheStreet.com titled, “Apple, Google, RIM: Smartphone Shakeout”. The author, Scott Moritz, opines on the current state and future of the major smartphone players including Apple, Google and Rim.
In his analysis of Apple, Scott mentions AT&T’s network outages suggesting the debacle may indeed tarnish customers’ perception of AT&T. Indeed, I agree with Scott on this point, however, I don’t feel it’s a deal breaker for most average iPhone customers who have modest usage requirements. Scott goes on to suggest “the iPhone is getting stale. Design fatigue will soon set in as gadget fans start to crave something new”. Design fatigue? According to who? The iPhone remains the most elegant piece of hardware and offers the slickest and most intuitive user interface available today.
Scott goes on to suggest the next iteration of iPhone will require a significant improvement to motivate original iPhone owners to upgrade and to capture new customers. While I do agree that Apple needs to continue to innovate, I don’t believe the next iPhone requires a significant improvement or risk losing customers. Existing iPhone customer would not simply drop their iPhone in favour of a competing smartphone. For one, the user experience of the iPhone and the ecosystem Apple has developed with the App Store and iTunes provide an extremely compelling reason to stick with Apple, especially if you’ve invested in apps. As for attracting new customers, Apple’s marketing machine will take care of that. Apple has really captured the hearts and minds of consumers with great advertising and with great products such as the iPod and iPhone. Average customers such as families, students, regular people, not tech geeks will have Apple at the top of their list when evaluating a smartphone. Let’s face it….if you want your kid to be the black sheep of the class, send them to school with a Black Berry.
Now, I think it’s important to stress that I’m talking about consumers here, not corporate customers. Apple has never aggressively targeted the corporate market and may not need to. Corporate penetration will occur organically as more and more consumers ask their IT departments to support iPhone. That being said, as a Canadian, I truly hope RIM continues to flourish and succeed in corporate environments. Competition is good for the industry and for consumers, however; I just can’t see them gaining any real traction in the consumer smartphone market.
As for Google, I do agree with Scott that it is still too early to make any predictions regarding the success or failure of Android. Certainly sophisticated users who don’t like playing in Apple’s sand box and prefer Android’s open, albeit, less tightly integrated ecosystem will embrace Android, but are there enough of them to really challenge Rim and Apple? I think we’ll still be having this same debate at the end of 2010.
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