Microsoft bought Nokia! Yawn! They get some nifty patents, but are still stuck trying to compete with free. As is Apple. It is tough to compete with free… Nuff said.
One of the smartest career (and personal) moves I ever made was to avoid anything to do with handsets. Being honest, it rewarded the sort of analysis I was lousy at (attention to detail, chatter, supply chain datapoints, and legally suspect information flows). But after a short supernova period, handsets were clearly going to collapse into a dull, consumer product black hole. Then you’d be stuck with a whole lot of useless knowledge. That collapse is happening now. And I am grateful I won’t have to write off too many brain cells as it does.
Forget MSFT’s obvious weakness. The problem is that phones have turned into mundane, indistinguishable, shiny rectangles (mostly black). That is physically true, but even more so perceptually. People depend on their phones, but they care about them less and less.
- Even the most ardent iPhone fan-boy will admit that the thrill is pretty much gone by the 5th iteration. I LOVED my first smartphone. I like my second one. Of course, a minority will keep buying the next thing. We might even get a re-run of the “luxury” diamond-and-gold encrusted phone (remember Vertu?). But the mass market is losing vitality with each phone generation.
- The features race has hit diminishing returns. That is obvious from the increasingly labored (and fairly preposterous) efforts to develop some “new” feature. OK, so I can talk to my Moto X as long as I am willing to preface everything with “OK Google.” Nice, but not compelling. And the form factor is pretty fixed – unless someone re-engineers the human hand.
- Everyone with money is already locked in. You are either an iPhone person or an Android person and that is probably set in stone. iPhone users put up with weirdly cramped screens. Android users struggle to find phones that aren’t the size of a bedsheet. If there is any switching, it is a bleed to Android based largely on cost.
- The next big thing is everyone without money – emerging markets. That means even cheaper and less feature-amazing phones. And they will almost all be Android (see “free” and “Chinese handset makers”). Nokia does have some amazing 3rd world presence. But about that “free” thing….
End result. A high volume, low profit market driven largely by replacement/repair cycles. Yawn.
To that end, one of my favorite recent Onion Headlines – “New iPhone Geared Towards College-Aged Girls Comes With Pre-Shattered Screen” http://www.theonion.com/video/new-iphone-geared-towards-collegeaged-girls-comes,30769/
