The Real Threat That Samsung Poses to Apple

Interesting guest post at Asymco by James Allworth. I disagree with him that smartphone hardware has yet been commoditized — at the low end, sure, but there have always been low-end commodity cell phones. At the high end though, it’s still early days. There are many dramatic innovations yet to come.

But his story about Dell and Asus, from Clayton Christensen’s latest book, is quite interesting:

Asus came to Dell and said, “We’ve done a good job fabricating these motherboards for you. Why don’t you let us assemble the whole computer for you, too? Assembling those products is not what’s made you successful. We can take all the remaining manufacturing assets off your balance sheet, and we can do it all for 20 percent less.”

The Dell analysts realized that this, too, was a win- win… […]

Then, in 2005, Asus announced the creation of its own brand of computers.

★ Friday, 7 December 2012