iCloud’s real purpose: kill Windows. Apple’s announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function — killing Microsoft.
Here is the money line from Jobs yesterday: “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device – just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We’re going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud.” Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data is the computer. This redefines digital incumbency. How many iPads did Apple sell? Perhaps the question analysts should be asking is how fast could it build them?
iPhone ramp-ups. Source: Asymco. Click to enlarge. When estimating unit sales in a highly competitive market -- like computers or cell phones -- the traditional method is to sample some part of the sales channel and use that as a proxy for the broader market. In a post entitled "Predicting iPhone sales for dummies," Asymco's Horace Dediu makes a strong case that in markets where demand outstrips supply -- as it often does for Apple's (AAPL) new devices -- a better way to estimate sales is to determine the constraints on production and try to measure those.