> Apple and MS mark success by unit shipments, and the strategies for protecting those kinds of positions differ.
Apple and MS mark success by the benjamins on their balance sheets, just like HTC, Samsung, and RIM. If any of them could dip a Blackberry 6700 in Elmer's glue, roll it around in a bin of diamonds, and reliably sell it to some Saudi prince for $50 billion once per quarter, they would; but it turns out that selling normal phones to normal people stacks cheddar more reliably.
No, that's oversimplified. Yes, all public corporations seek profit by definition. But to claim that there isn't a significant cultural determiner for the ways they do that is silly. ExxonMobil and ADM don't sell packaged consumer products and probably never will. IBM does a ton of IT contract business, where Nestle and Apple do none.
And, specific to this point: Google doesn't chase unit sales, they've made their business in advertising, chasing eyeballs and traffic. Apple sells hardware, and broadly wants to sell more hardware.
Google sure loves to comment on the number of activations occurring on a daily basis. This ties into both eyeballs and hardware sales of Android partners.
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> Apple and MS mark success by unit shipments, and the strategies for protecting those kinds of positions differ.
Apple and MS mark success by the benjamins on their balance sheets, just like HTC, Samsung, and RIM. If any of them could dip a Blackberry 6700 in Elmer's glue, roll it around in a bin of diamonds, and reliably sell it to some Saudi prince for $50 billion once per quarter, they would; but it turns out that selling normal phones to normal people stacks cheddar more reliably.
No, that's oversimplified. Yes, all public corporations seek profit by definition. But to claim that there isn't a significant cultural determiner for the ways they do that is silly. ExxonMobil and ADM don't sell packaged consumer products and probably never will. IBM does a ton of IT contract business, where Nestle and Apple do none.
And, specific to this point: Google doesn't chase unit sales, they've made their business in advertising, chasing eyeballs and traffic. Apple sells hardware, and broadly wants to sell more hardware.
Google sure loves to comment on the number of activations occurring on a daily basis. This ties into both eyeballs and hardware sales of Android partners.