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You can always tell when a competitor is concerned. They spend most of their time focused on you, and bitching about how customers would be better opting for your ‘product'. HTC acting president Martin Fichter apparently ran a survey through Reed College and the result? Well, the iPhone just isn't cool anymore.
He spoke out at the Mobile Future Forward conference in downtown Seattle and the talk was moderated by BloomBerg BusinessWeek's Brad Stone.
He talked about the iPhone 5 and said “Apple is innovating. Samsung is innovating. We are innovating. Everybody is innovating. And everybody is doing different things for the end consumers. I brought my daughter back to college — she’s down in Portland at Reed — and I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: ‘My dad has an iPhone.’ There’s an interesting thing that is going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufacture’s devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. iPhones are not that cool anymore. We here are using iPhones, but our kids don’t find them that cool anymore.”
He also spoke out about Windows Phone 7, the latest platform from Microsoft which is struggling in such a competitive market “It has shortcomings in some areas, so I am quite happy to see how Mango has improved all of that. I think Windows Phone 7 is a bit hampered by the whole energy in the industry right now for 4G. All the carriers are pushing their 4G networks and with Windows Phone 7 not yet supporting that … there is a shortcoming there that is not so much a problem for the end-consumer, but it is a problem for the consumer not being pushed towards Windows because another phone might be more attractive to cell phone carriers.”
Maybe they need more young kids like this to sell the iPhone?
He also followed up with GeekWire, and said that they don't want to ‘kill the iPhone' – you can read this over here.
Kitguru says: HTC and Apple are still locked in legal battle, but Google have stepped in to help HTC by giving them some patents.
Interesting stuff !
I knew a guy who’s dad had a Rolls Royce. I can bet you 5 Million his son definitely didn’t want a Rolls Royce “because his father had one.”
Also, I can go to my local College too and ask a bunch of random students if they prefer AMD or Nvidia, not document the survery, and “forget” about any answers that might be unfriendly to the point I’m trying to prove.
Difference is, I would never mention it publicly in some pathetic desperate attempt to prove some point with such a scientific method. I actually wish he’d just used some Analyst BS instead, would have saved himself the embarrassment. I wonder what his board thinks about this, I mean, they can’t possibly all be nodding their heads intelligently and stroking their EPEEN thinking “yeah, Apple isn’t so cool anymore, we’re about to make the big bucks” based off of this, are they?
iOS has the biggest Mobile Gaming Market for Smartphones right now, beating Android’s, among other things. Seeing as most Mobile Gamers are still bored Teenagers trying to play Tetris in the Classroom or (soon) Battlefield 3 during Car/Bus Trips, I’m pretty sure the iPhone isn’t dead with kids. And that’s just one example.
interesting points.. the old “my dad has one” is just going to get more and more common and thats the start of entropy for Apple as far as the iphone goes.
ohh and that little kid toward the end reminded me of Steve Ballmer