The description is so preposterous that it is noteworthy – a business reporter in a major Canadian newspaper wrote that there is a “sense of stagnation” in the mobile industry.
In the Toronto Star piece http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1157843--tech-s-great-expectations-wh...
titled Tech’s great expectations: Why consumers are often neither shaken nor stirred, Michael Lewis (no, not the Michael Lewis from Moneyball fame) sought to call out mobile for what he considers small or no advances.
“With the wow factor conspicuously absent from the latest crop of smartphones and tablet PCs offered by vendors including Apple Inc., some experts are asking whether innovation has hit a wall in the post-Jobs era,” Lewis wrote. “The sense of stagnation was reinforced at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where dozens of smartphones were unveiled by vendors including HTC Corp. and Samsung Electronics in what one blogger called an outpouring of “product spam.”
Granted, the story appeared before Facebook paid $1 billion for pioneering Instagram so that it could be a bigger player in mobile. But where was Lewis when the third iPad was introduced, or when Nokia showed a 41-megapixel phone, or when Draw Something saw 50 million downloads in 50 days?
It would be too easy to suggest that Lewis has been dulled by the lack of innovation by Canadian company RIM.
The reporter attempted to back up his premise with interviews from industry analysts and academia.
According to Lewis, “Forrester Research senior analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said the market’s sense of what constitutes true innovation ‘has warped to the point where if Apple’s next product doesn’t make cars fly or enable mind control, we yawn and change the channel.’”
And then there were these comments from Sidneyeve Matrix, an assistant professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. (note - I follow Matrix on Twitter and find her to be insightful).
She was quoted by Lewis as saying, “There is no doubt people feel underwhelmed.” Lewis said that Matrix noted that, “the two most recent Apple product announcements under chief executive Tim Cook have been about incremental rather than revolutionary change. And the next iPhone ‘probably won’t move the needle that much either.’”
Lewis apparently didn’t talk to others. He should have.
Gartner predicts that tablet sales will double in 2012. Further, it said that iPad shipments will quadruple from 2011 to 2016. J.P. Morgan recently upped its first quarter estimate of iPhones sold to 31.1 million, three million more than first projected.
That doesn’t sound like stagnation to me.
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Article first posted on imediaconnection.com http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2012/04/11/no-mobile-hype-here-just-cl...
