Search This Blog

Friday, March 7, 2008

Did the iPhone SDK mean Apple will corner the Anywhere device market?

asus_eee.jpg

GottaBeMobile.com has an interesting claim that Apple's SDK announcement yesterday may have an unexpected result:

Apple opened a big door with the announcement and shut quite a few others in the process. Apple not only took the UMPC/MID market away, it will own mobile for some time to come, with everyone else playing catch up. The race to the top is over. Now everyone else can scramble to figure out who is number two.

[From GottaBeMobile.com]

So here's how I'm going to gauge whether this is happening or not: track the sales of Asus Eee PC at Amazon. If they fall off a cliff, Apple killed the segment. But given the incredible diversity of developers and users, some of whom have not interest in iPhones or Apple, I suspect they'll do just fine. The key to thinking about Anywhere products is that people have many different requirements for how they will use and buy mobile devices. No one company can meet all those needs, no matter how wonderful the device.

Of course, that doesn't mean that Apple won't make a whole lot of money trying.

2 comments:

beanie said...

ASUS Eee PC now with Microsoft Windows XP pre-installed was launched a few days ago.

beanie said...

Sun announced they will get Java J2ME virtual machine on the iPhone. So will Adobe follow and get Flash on the iPhone?

So is Java not used anymore and Flash too slow or does Apple just want to lock developers into "native" Cocoa development? Assuming Adobe will get Flash on to the iPhone, developers can choose Cocoa, Flash or Java.