Robert Pogson

I have great respect for Digitimes. They have their finger on the pulse of IT, particularly in China, but they are out to lunch with the story that Apple will overtake HP in personal computing even if tablets are considered in the mix. Digitimes’ story assumes that Apple will continue with a huge share of tablets. That will fall apart because Android/Linux is being pushed by more than a dozen players large and small, each with some variation on the basic OS developed by Google. What this will mean is that consumers will be faced with many choices. While Apple has a large and growing following, the world is much bigger than Apple and consumers, particularly in the hot emerging markets will love small cheap Android/Linux tablets and smart phones.

There is no particular magic that Apple has to prevent the same fate that befell the smart phone. A year ago Apple was triumphant. Today they are a follower in the crowd. Consumers did not buy only iPhones and they will not buy only iPads.

see Digitimes – Apple likely to dethrone HP as leading portable PC vendor

It is possible that Apple will topple HP on the basis of the iPad but it is much more likely that hordes of really neat Android/Linux tablets will swarm all over Apple and HP both. Remember, the first half of 2011, Apple mostly had the tablet market to itself. Now versions of Android/Linux designed for tablets are in play and big and small players are rushing product to market maxing out supply chains. Apple has secured huge supplies of components but the world is springing to produce more.

• IDC reported that only 17 million tablets shipped in 2010, most of them iPads. In January, 2011, IDC predicted 2011 would see 44 million tablets sold and 2012 would see 71 million sold.
• Last week, IDC revised its prediction. Now they see “Media Tablets to double in 2011, Android to triple“. If 2010 had 83:17 of 17 million tablets ( 14 million iPads and 3 million Android/Linux tablets) then 2011 will be 34million tablets with 9 million Androids and 25 million iPads. That is not enough iPads to displace HP. HP is about double that many PCs ahead.
• iSuppli sees sales of tablets to grow nine times in 2011. Apple cannot possibly manage that rate of growth. Most of it will be Android/Linux. Apple can barely manage to double production in a year.

M$ has a great racket going. They do a few $billion of work creating software and then get others to sell/distribute it for free. The result is $billons of licensing fees flowing in far beyond the normal return of a productive business. The secret is that M$’s partners are slaves, working for free. Sure, the consumers pay M$’s partners, but M$ gets the service for free and the partners do the vast majority of the work. M$ rakes in around $60 billion annually and has 100K employees. That’s $600K per employee… How much does your average employee make?

The slaves are becoming restless, however. They have been re-enlisting customers for decades but now M$ wants to cut the slaves out of the profits. M$’s office suite in the cloud will be billed directly from M$ with no middleman. Thank you very much, slave, for giving me this new cash-cow. Good-bye.

see Microsoft dismisses reseller critics of Office 365

• “resellers relying on purely transacting licences were going to find life increasingly tough”
• “If you are not customising or adding value you should not be in the food chain”

Well, partners, who’s really running your business? Should you be feeding M$? Should M$ be rattling your chain? Wasn’t it only a decade ago that M$ was telling OEMs they had severe limits on customization? Maybe M$ should not be in the food chain. If you have to actually work for a living, shouldn’t M$ do the same?