2016’s Business Winners and Losers(swotnot.com) |
2016’s Business Winners and Losers(swotnot.com) |
the MacBook Pro was widely parodied
This reads more as a summarization of 2016 press sentiment than a rigorous analysis of whether companies are "winning or losing". How many Pixels did Google sell? How many MBPs did Apple sell?
That being said, I take your point there isn't data available to back everything up (as you'll know, companies are pretty selective about releasing some data points), and so I've leant more on press sentiment in those cases.
So hence they ended up in the 'losers' column.
Of course that doesn't mean they had quite as terrible year as some in the list...but for ease of reference it's a binary list rather than a gradient.
There was also a noticeable lack of product updates though; MBA, iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro. That's two times Pro. Apple is losing on the top segment of laptops/workstations. They're doing rather well on handheld/portable devices.
The reason people say Apple is 'losing' is because they perceive the competition is catching up on high quality laptop/notebook design, as well as hybrid tablet/notebook. Wether that is true remains to be seen.
Well, if everyone's doing it then in a certain sense they _have_ lost a lot of their cachet, no?
Also, you don't remember the late 90s. I was a huge Apple fan back then, and those were some disheartening years. In retrospect, I rather wish I'd bought their stock back then …
There are some signs that they may be headed for trouble eventually, but they're fairly minor, considering.
But the other challenge is what is captured here is not an object measurement instead it is "performance against expectations" which makes people like Apple a "loser" even though they shipped more product and made more money than Google a "winner."
The EVP of marketing at NetApp used to have a chart on their wall which had all of NetApp's competitors and an arrow next to it, which was their "path" and the path could be up, forward, or down. It had a similar feel. It is useful as a leading indicator of future challenges. And by that I mean that you can miss expectations one year and be fine, but miss for 2 or more years in a row, or regularly have a miss every few years, and its harder to be perceived as the leader.
Not sure if this is good or bad, just an observation.