Six Things That Could Derail the Apple Cart
The Apple juggernaut has been going from strength to strength while Apple shares continue to defy gravity. The question is whether anything could knock Apple off stride? To offer some food for thought, here are some suggestions are the Mac Nation braces itself for Macworld.
1. 2008 turns out to be a boring year, relatively speaking, in terms of new product releases. After all, 2007 was a monster year with the launch of the iPhone; an overhauled iPod lineup, including the Touch; and, of course, the appearance of new operating system, Leopard. Not to dismiss the ultra-portable laptop being speculated about but 2008 looks to be far less exciting. (Update: You can check out the MacBook Air here.)
2. The iPod market begins to reach a saturation point. It’s only taken a few years but the iPod is now ubiquitous - if you’ve bought an MP3 player recently, chances are that it’s an iPod. The question is whether there are enough people without iPods to continue to fuel demand, and/or whether Apple can release new models that get existing iPod users to upgrade.
3. Steve Jobs’ health. Knock on wood, Jobs’ scare with pancreatic cancer has been effectively addressed. But given he’s Apple’s visionary and his heir apparent is far from clear, his ability to continue to lead Apple is a crucial issue for the company’s ongoing success.
4. A strategic mistake that causes Apple to lose focus. Robert Cringely, for example, has suggested Apple should buy Adobe - a multi-billion dollar move ($22-billion to be exact) that would certainly give Apple a wider and stronger arsenal but would consume a lot of senior management cycles to integrate. Apple could also spin its strategic wheels if it gets into the wireless business with Google.
5. Competition. While there doesn’t appear to be any viable iPod rivals on the horizon, there are suggestions Apple will face competition from companies such as Amazon, which is making a major push into the music and movie markets. Meanwhile, some of the music labels are showing signs of getting their act together while Yahoo’s Ian Rogers appears to have some innovative ideas.
6. Microsoft manages to fix Vista or upgrades XP so that Leopard loses the huge goodwill advantage is now enjoys. Of course, Microsoft has a long way to go if it wants to stage an OS comeback but you never know.
Update: MacRumorsLive is liveblogging Jobs’ keynote.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Macworld, Steve Jobs
January 15th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Great points Mark, I hadn’t heard the Adobe one before.
Regarding the iPods, I don’t know about you, but our family has:
- 2 Nanos
- 1 16GB iPod Touch
- 1 8Gb iPhone
While it’s true the saturation point may be quickly approaching, I think we’re going to see people upgrading to newer iPods, especially now that they’re being released with greater features and more capabilities. It’s a similar reason that people buy new computers every few years.
January 15th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Sure Apple could blow a product cycle. the new macs this year could suck. It can happen to anyone, it’s happened to apple before.
That said, there are some huge markets still open to apple that they haven’t even tried to crack.
such as the enterprise business market, and the consumer/gamer/enthusiast market.
Especially the former, represent the lion’s share of the computer industry (albeit highly commodotized).
The question is, is apple prepared to expand into their untapped markets, even if it has to be at lower gross margins to keep achieving top-line growth? (the same might be said for their download/media business as well)
January 15th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Tom,
I agree that enterprise is a huge market that Apple could pursue but, to date, has yet to really go after it. If you take a look at Cringley’s story, one of the opening paragraphs is this:
“About 18 months ago an Apple employee at an internal meeting asked Steve Jobs about Apple’s positioning in the enterprise market. Jobs told the employee that IT wasn’t really Apple’s business and that he should go work at a company like IBM or HP if he wanted to pursue that line of work.”