If you don't cannibalize your own products, someone else will

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/opinion/1635335/why-apple-regret-ipad

You need to be the one cannibalizing your own products. Too many companies make the mistake of trying to protect their one great idea from anything that might threaten it. In doing so they prevent themselves from innovating.

What will the iPad compete against?

It's interesting to compare the iPad to other devices it will be competing with:

Sources:

Sony DVD Player

Kindle DX

PSPgo

Nintendo DSi

JooJoo

Dell Mini

MacBook

iPad

How Bad is the Web in Mobile Safari?

There's been a lot of complaining about how the new iPad doesn't support "the real web" because it doesn't support Flash. The implication is that Flash is so essential to the web, that not having it in the iPad makes the web browser useless.

There's a post at http://theflashblog.com/?p=1703 that attempts to drive this point home by showing some photoshop mockups of what they think web sites will look like on the iPad.

Rather than fake photoshop mockups, how do some of those sites look in mobile safari on the iPhone today?

Are there websites that don't work and are broken? Certainly. But implying that the lack of Flash makes sites like CNN, Disney, and Google Financials useless is just wrong.

[update]

Mark Damon Hughes has another good comparison of the sites demonstrated above.

App Stores are Hard

Walt Mossberg:

The Pre’s biggest disadvantage is its app store, the App Catalog. At launch, it has only about a dozen apps, compared with over 40,000 for the iPhone, and thousands each for the G1 and the modern BlackBerry models. Even worse, the Pre App Catalog isn’t finished. It’s immature, it’s labeled a beta, and Palm has yet to release the tools for making Pre apps available to more than a small group of developers.

In fact, during my testing, one of my downloads from the App Catalog caused my Pre to crash disastrously — all my email, contacts and other data were wiped out, and the phone was unable to connect to the Sprint network or Wi-Fi. Palm conceded the catastrophe was due to problems it still has getting the App Catalog to work with the phone’s internal memory, and explained that this is one reason it hasn’t widely distributed the developer tools.

Maybe this is why Apple released the App store a year after the iPhone had been on the market?

iPhone Price Drop - Go For Market Share

A lot has been said about the recent iPhone price drop. Fairness aside, I think that the price drop is signaling a shift in Apple's overall strategy that's been happening slowly ever since the first iPod was introduced.

Apple is going for market share.

The 90s were plagued by Apple executives creating niche products and being happy with their great profit margins. However the iPod success has given Apple a taste of what its like to be the market leader. Apple sees another opportunity to become a market leader in the phone space, and they know they have to compete on price. Sure they could have held the price of the iPhone high through Christmas, and probably would have ended up making more money, but selling fewer phones. The price drop indicated Apple's desire to sell more phones, not necessarily to make more money. Apple is learning from watching other companies dominate in other markets. Step 1, become the de-facto standard, worry about profits later.

Apple has a long, long way to go to become that standard, but they have a shot at least. Nokia, Motorolla, Microsoft, Blackberry, Palm, etc all have a piece of the pie right now, but it would be hard to argue that any one has become a standard in the way that the iPod has. I don't know if Apple will succeed in this market, but the price drop indicates that they are going to make a serious push to dominate it.