Executive Insight

March 9, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

NPD’s recently-released January PC sales figures showed some disturbing trends for Apple.

And while no one, least of all me is ready to call it a crisis the numbers appear to cry out for some creative product development from Apple. If we look back to the release of Leopard we can trace a continuing growth in sales from Apple without any price degradation at all. As the economy has collapsed around us Apple has been delivering and selling desktops and notebooks with average prices of $1500, into a market where the average Windows PC is less than half of that. Bravo to them, as maintaining sales velocity, brand integrity, and pricing has been a trick very few consumer technology companies have been able to pull off. Continuing to make it work appears, aft...Read More

December 3, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

One of the greatest results of the consumer technology revolution is that just about everyone can afford a great piece of electronics if they want to, and even if they don’t want a great device, they can still get something functional. 

Much like the auto business, we in electronics have driven our products into the hinterlands. Unfortunately, we don’t have a great rallying cry like “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” but we can at least lay claim to a digital camera for every user (1.2 cameras per household) or a PC in every home (computer penetration at 85 percent). And while this gives the impression we have done our jobs, it does create a big problem — the inevitable “what next?” 

As we were blithely cranking up the size of the total available market (TAM) we were forgetting that the fi...Read More