How much of an impact will these new iPhones have on that segment? There are a bunch of reasons why someone would buy a high-end Android rather than an iPhone:
Their operator subsidies an Android but not an iPhone – this has now ended, with Apple adding distribution with all the last significant hold-outs (Sprint, DoCoMo, China Mobile)
They don’t particularly care what phone they get and the salesman was on more commission to sell Androids or, more probably, Samsungs that day (and iPhones the next, of course)
They have a dislike of Apple per se – this is hard to quantify but probably pretty small, and balanced by people with a dislike of Google
They are heavily bought into the Google ecosystem
They like the customizations that are possible with Android and that have not been possible with iOS until (to a much increased extent) iOS8 (more broadly, once could characterize this as ‘personal taste’)
They want a larger screen.
Splitting these out, the first has largely gone, the second is of little value to an ecosystem player and nets out at zero (i.e. Apple gains as many indifferent users as it loses) and the third is small. Apple has now addressed the fifth and sixth, and the massive increase in third-party attach points means that Google’s ecosystem (and Facebook’s incidentally) can now push deep into iOS – if Google chooses to do so.
That is, with the iPhone 6 and iOS8, Apple has done its best to close off all the reasons to buy high-end Android beyond simple personal preference. You can get a bigger screen, you can change the keyboard, you can put widgets on the notification panel (if you insist) and so on. Pretty much all the external reasons to choose Android are addressed – what remains is personal taste.
Amongst other things, this is a major cull of Steve Jobs’ sacred cows – lots of these are decisions he was deeply involved in. No-one was quicker than Steve Jobs himself to change his mind, but it’s refreshing to see so many outdated assumptions being thrown out.
via iPhone 6 and Android value — Benedict Evans.
Why Amazon Has No Profits (And Why It Works) — Benedict Evans
Amazon has perhaps 1% of the US retail market by value. Should it stop entering new categories and markets and instead take profit, and by extension leave those segments and markets for other companies? Or should it keep investing to sweep them into the platform? Jeff Bezos’s view is pretty clear: keep investing, because to take profit out of the business would be to waste the opportunity. He seems very happy to keep seizing new opportunities, creating new businesses, and using every last penny to do it.
Still, investors put their money into companies, Amazon and any other, with the expectation that at some point they will get cash out. With Amazon, Bezos is deferring that profit-producing, investor-rewarding day almost indefinitely into the future. This prompts the suggestion that Amazon is the world’s biggest ‘lifestyle business’ – Bezos is running it for fun, not to deliver economic returns to shareholders, at least not any time soon.
But while he certainly does seem to be having fun, he is also building a company, with all the cash he can get his hands on, to capture a larger and larger share of the future of commerce. When you buy Amazon stock (the main currency with which Amazon employees are paid, incidentally), you are buying a bet that he can convert a huge portion of all commerce to flow through the Amazon machine. The question to ask isn’t whether Amazon is some profitless ponzi scheme, but whether you believe Bezos can capture the future. That, and how long are you willing to wait?
via Why Amazon Has No Profits (And Why It Works) — Benedict Evans.
rePost::Binary confusion: kilobytes and kibibytes | blog.forret.com
In 1999, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) published Amendment 2 to “IEC 60027-2: Letter symbols to be used in electrical technology – Part 2: Telecommunications and electronics”;. This standard, which had been approved in 1998, introduced the prefixes kibi-, mebi-, gibi-, tebi-, pebi-, exbi-, to be used in specifying binary multiples of a quantity. The names come from the first two letters of the original SI prefixes followed by bi which is short for “binary”. It also clarifies that, from the point of view of the IEC, the SI prefixes only have their base-10 meaning and never have a base-2 meaning.
(from en.wikipedia.org)
So this is the correct usage for file, disk, memory size:
Kilobytes (KB) 1.000 Kibibyte (KiB) 1024
Megabyte (MB) 1.000 ^ 2 Mebibyte (MiB) 1024 ^ 2
Gigabyte (GB) 1.000 ^ 3 Gibibyte (GiB) 1024 ^ 3
Terabyte (TB) 1.000 ^ 4 Tebibyte (TiB) 1024 ^ 4
Petabyte (PB) 1.000 ^ 5 Pebibyte (PiB) 1024 ^ 5
… … … …
via Binary confusion: kilobytes and kibibytes | blog.forret.com.
First Time: Boxing
Angela finally succeeded in dragging me to the boxing gym today.
Although I forgot the doctor’s orders to check my blood pressure before engaging in strenuous physical activities.
I found training fun and exhausting.
Unfortunately this is an automatic half day if I plan on going in the morning.
Hope I can continue this.
Aja
Everyone can fly but Southeast Asia's budget airlines are cannibalizing the industry- Nikkei Asian Review
I remember an article/interview written by Warren Buffet saying how on aggregate airlines have no net profit over the lifetime of airlines. This has always stayed with me. Some business models are simply too unstable to be profitable for the long term. This was the reason I never subscribed to the Cebu Pacific IPO. Airlines are simply not good business. Of course there is the outlier in each business but look at all our airlines in the Philippines they are all basically the same.
But AirAsia seems to be suffering from a permanent structural problem, too, one that it hopes to fix by linking Southeast Asia with Japan.
An airline’s financial health is usually gauged by looking at its revenue per available seat mile. The RASM index is obtained by dividing operating income by available seat miles, which are calculated by multiplying available seats by the number of miles a carrier’s jetliners fly during a designated period. AirAsia’s RASM slid 7% in 2013.
AirAsia, founded in 2001, has continued to grow by wooing passengers from existing airlines with fares that at one point were more than 50% lower.
All the bargains AirAsia has been handing out have contributed to Malaysia Airlines’ financial crunch. AirAsia took to the skies with the marketing slogan “now everyone can fly,” but its dominance of the budget airline market lasted only a decade.
A week after Fernandes hugged Mikitani in front of Japanese reporters, Azran Osman-Rani, CEO of AirAsia X — the AirAsia group’s mid- and long-range flight operator — told The Nikkei that his carrier intends to double sales with flights to and from Japan in the next three years.
According to the CAPA — an independent provider of market intelligence, analysis and data services — budget airlines’ share of Southeast Asia’s aviation market on a number of seats basis grew to slightly less than 60% in 2013, almost double that of two years earlier.
Fare-slashing will probably continue; there is really no other option for a budget carrier. And the industry could end up cannibalizing itself.
Consider that the 2013 net profit of Philippines-based Cebu Pacific Air declined a whopping 85%. Or that Singapore-based Tigerair closed its Indonesian unit, Tigerair Mandala, on July 1.
Are you getting the picture?
via Everyone can fly but Southeast Asia’s budget airlines are cannibalizing the industry- Nikkei Asian Review.
Japanese companies turn Filipino workers into overseas leaders- Nikkei Asian Review
I’m so happy reading stuff like these that I have to link to in twice.
THI sends Filipino hires to Tsuneishi Shipbuilding, a core company of Tsuneishi group, in Fukuyama, for training in Japanese craftsmanship. Kawano said the company’s goal is to dispatch engineers from Cebu as instructors in Tsuneishi factories around the world.
Fifty THI employees have already been sent to Paraguay to work as technology instructors at a Tsuneishi Holdings dock that began building river boats in 2011. Tsuneishi also plans to build a new shipyard in Southeast Asia and dispatch THI technology instructors there too.
Learning to lead
via Japanese companies turn Filipino workers into overseas leaders- Nikkei Asian Review.
erPost:Japanese companies turn Filipino workers into overseas leaders- Nikkei Asian Review
This is amazing. This is moving up the value chain by virtue of being world class learners and teachers in engineering disciplines.
MANILA — The Philippines has long provided the Western world with highly skilled and motivated workers, especially in such fields as nursing, domestic help and back-office services. Now, Japanese companies are tapping into the potential of Filipino engineers and technicians.
A growing number of Japanese manufacturers are setting up “mother factories” in the Philippines and dispatching Filipino engineers to work as leaders in other parts of the world. Mother factories are responsible for product design and for standardizing production specifications and conditions.
Philippine-based Tsuneishi Heavy Industries, a subsidiary of Tsuneishi Holdings in Fukuyama, Hiroshima Prefecture, has been working to pass its expertise and skills on to Filipino workers. Tsuneishi Shipbuilding Chief Director Kenji Kawano said the aim is to develop THI into one of the world’s mother factories.
via Japanese companies turn Filipino workers into overseas leaders- Nikkei Asian Review.
rePost::UP basketball players go to games hungry – literally, says Maroon fan
Late reading this.
If you are from UP please read this!
One of our players was offered what would translate in any parlance as a “bribe” — allowances of all sorts, housing, and the spot cash of P1 million — just to play for another school. He is 17, young, impressionable, and impoverished like most of his teammates. Saying “yes” would have been the easier and more lucrative response. True to his UP education, I was told, he gave an emphatic “No!”
But like I said, basketball has grown shamelessly commercialized these days. The other school went directly to our player’s hometown to talk to his parents. If the kid won’t agree, perhaps, the parents will be a tad less uncompromising, they must have thought.
Our Maroon, having learned of what happened, borrowed money, practically begging for airfare so he can convince his parents otherwise. Back in his hometown, he pleaded with them: “I am staying in UP. I will get my UP diploma. UP is my team, my second family, my community!”
Of course, every parent would want the best for their children. The offer was tempting, sure, but the kid’s plea was also unbending. The father requested only one thing: one win, one win out of several games in a season; not the championship, not the MVP, just one win; not the sun and the stars, just a ray of hope that this adolescent does not waste away his future on something so abstract as the “UP way.”
via UP basketball players go to games hungry – literally, says Maroon fan.
Video:Introducing Ikea's Book Book
Hype machine deconstructed through this funny ad.
Gilas wins against Senegal
The Philippine National Basketball team Gilas Pilipinas finally wins our first game in the world championships since 1978 I think.
All he loses were close and probably winnable with better preparation. Props to all the PBA owners who lent their players to the National team with the Caveat that they really should have just released the players instead of being assholes and playing another conference.
Laban Pilipinas Puso