Linked List: August 14, 2013

Wednesday, 14 August 2013

‘Happy Bennigan’s to You’ 

This week’s guest on Dave Wiskus and Lex Friedman’s Unprofessional: yours truly. The topic: chain restaurants.

Customer Acquisition and the Entry Level iPhone 

Another great piece of analysis on the purportedly imminent lower-priced iPhone, this one from Ben Bajarin:

The fallacy those who think price is all that matters fall into is believing that all consumers value the same thing. It is incorrect to believe that its hard to compete with free. It is easy, all you do is create a better product, experience, or solution, and market it to those who will value it. […]

Interesting point here, too:

As much as Apple will benefit from getting new customers with an entry level iPhone that benefits their ecosystem so will Google. We know Google makes more on iOS than Android and interestingly an entry level iPhone will likely help Google’s bottom line as well.

The Difference Between iOS and Android Developers and Why It’s Not Just a Numbers Game 

Rene Ritchie:

The Mac, though its market share was never large, especially when compared to the well over 90% marketshare of Microsoft Windows-based PCs, had always attracted an incredibly talented, incredibly dedicated group of developers who cared deeply about things like design and user experience. OS X enjoyed not only the traditional Mac OS community, but the NeXT one as well. That talent share always felt disproportionate to the market share. Massively. And a lot of those developers, and new developers influenced by them, not only wanted iPhones and iPads, but wanted to create software for them.

The numbers game matters, but it’s just one factor among many.

Steve Cheney: ‘On the Future of iOS and Android’ 

Great post on the competitive landscape from Steve Cheney:

It’s not even funny how bad fragmentation will hurt Android and Google in location based sharing and payments apps, short range sharing, and the type of things developers build on top of iBeacon (e.g. payments). Fragmentation doesn’t matter as much when you are the only one person affected, people deal with it. But when your Android phone won’t communicate with others or at POS terminals (tablets / iPads) it will be tough to rationalize. Bluetooth LE in Android is happening now, but fragmentation is a deal killer for devs, and this ensures that state of the art apps around local discovery / wireless will rarely support Android. It’s already happening — Tile has raised about $3M from 50K backers and there will be no Android support (these are tagging devices running Bluetooth LE that help you find lost keys etc).