I’ve came across a very interesting article on Quartz blog featuring a few quotes from Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreesen.
According to the post, during his interview at a recent Quartz event in New York City posited that Tim Cook and Steve Jobs have different strategies when it comes to running Apple.
Here are some of the key points Marc Andreesen made in his interview:
- The Apple playbook under Steve Jobs was a single playbook. He would invent a new product category, start with 100% market share, and then every day that goes by, lose market share until some terminal outcome.
- In the case of the Macintosh computer in the late 1990s, that “terminal outcome” was a market share that hit bottom at around 2% of the share of PCs, with Windows and Linux-based PCs comprising the rest.
- Steve Jobs didn’t care about market share,” and was focused instead on the margins and “pricing umbrella” he could achieve by selling high-end products to a subset of consumers willing to pay a premium. This strategy worked for Jobs in part because he was confident that even as his products lost market share, he could always simply invent the next great thing and start the cycle all over again.
- Tim Cook is more focused on market share than Jobs was, and may try to engage competitors like Google and Samsung directly, in an attempt to hold onto as many users as possible.
- In the long run in these markets (mobile), if you’re not the majority market share, you don’t have the majority of the apps.
- Apple will bottom out at around 15% or 20% of the market, with Android capturing the rest.
These are some very going observations from Andreesen as usual, however, I beg to differ on the Steve Jobs and Tim Cook having different strategies for Apple point.
I believe Apple’s approach has always been consistent under both of these fellows’ leadership. The challenges Apple face in the smartphone market is much bigger than that of the Tablet market, hence the differing strategies.
Just recently it was reported that the main reason China Mobile hasn’t got the iPhone as yet is because of business and technology hurdles.
China Mobile president Li Yue is quoted as saying:
[quote] Technology is a problem, but it isn’t the entire problem; there’s also mainly the issue of business model and mutual benefits.[/quote]
[quote] Q: You are the tablet market right now… This is the second time you’ve come on to talk about competition, and I’m just wondering if much like Apple encroaching on RIM’s monopoly in enterprise, if you think Apple is gonna be able to sustain share growth for tablets amid some of those new competitive headwinds. Some of those players may try different things and strategies, like tethering and Flash, multitasking, less content and app restrictions, and subsidized pricing. Just wondered if you think that may create itself a more fragmented market.]
I have a hard time envisioning what those strategies you mentioned are. In terms of pricing, so far the little we’ve seen, the tablets with far less functionality are having a hard time matching us in price. Flash hasn’t presented any problem at all—as you know, most of the video on web is now available in HTML5. And having the iTunes media store and over 35,000 apps on the App Store for iPad dwarfs anything else. And we think we have a very good product here that’s gonna be hard to match, and we’re not done, we’re working on a lot of things for the future. So I don’t know what exactly these strategies are, and we’ve priced iPad pretty aggressively. So we’re out to win this one.[/quote]
From the quote above, you can clearly see that Apple’s strategy has always has been to win the tablet category. Hence the introduction of the iPad mini.
