Mic Wright:
The reasons I make these comparisons between me – a writer-turned-CEO who is hoping to upgrade his pot to piss in – and Zuckerberg – one of the visionary founders of his generation – is to ask this question: why do so many pundits presume that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know what he’s doing? This is a guy who persuaded a group of some of the Valley’s most respected investors to back him, a guy who managed to navigate law suits and scaling issues to build a company that is now one of the big four tech companies beside Google, Apple and Microsoft.
This is exactly what pisses me off when people talk about Apple. Analysts and pundits always think they know better than Tim Cook. If that’s true, why aren’t they running a billion dollar company? The answer is simple—they aren’t qualified.
See also the reviews of the 12.1 in Samsung Galaxy Pro tablet. The pundits are saying Apple “has to” make a “Pro” (read, big) tablet. Samsung has made one and even Engadget can’t see why they bothered…
The Verge gave it 5.9 out of 10. THE VERGE!!!
There’s more and more armchair-Deciders out there, for sure. Particularly when it comes to Apple.
On the flip side, Apple critics also often miss the elephant in the room. For example, last week 99.9% of the articles about messaging apps – sparked by the Whatsapp acquisition – failed to mention iMessage at all.
Actually, I don’t think pundits really care whether their soothsaying is accurate or not. All they care about is web traffic. Their business isn’t accurate soothsaying. Their business is punditry, and according to the OS X dictionary’s Wikipedia definition, “pundit” means:
“A pundit (sometimes called Talking Head) is someone who offers to mass media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area…”
The key words being “opinion” and “commentary.” Nothing about accuracy or expertise.
OMG. And that’s on the signature “Apple vs. non-Apple” sliding scale that the Verge uses. You know, when non-Apple products that are crappy are forgiven just a little. Because the Verge is deathly afraid of alienating any geek faction. It’s all about total web traffic.
iMessage: big in the industrialized world.
WhatsApp: big in Botswana.
Why does this only piss you off when it happens to Apple? Why not Google and Samsung and Microsoft?
Yeah, as we all know, Europe isn’t part of the industrialized world.
So you guys in America don’t use WhatsApp. Bully for you. What makes you think that you’re the only ones who matter?
iMessage is a non-entity. It’s a feature, not a product. It makes messaging between iPhones free. That’s 99% of its value. It’s not a platform like WhatsApp.
Don’t get me wrong, iMessage could have been WhatsApp. Apple decided not to go that route. Maybe it was the right choice, but the result is that they don’t own a market that they could have owned.
What measuring stick are you using?
In January 2013 Apple revealed they were passing 2 billion iMessages through the system. iMessage is compatible with iPhone 4, 4S, 5 and 5S. I haven’t tallied shipments for those four iterations, but it’s got to be in the neighborhood of 250-300 million units combined?
iMessage also runs from compatible Macs. Just saying.
One has to wonder what the reviewer really thought of the device before being reminded to grade it on a curve.
I can’t speak for Mr. D., but I think my answer would be “why bother writing about things that don’t interest me?”
@Lukas,
Apple’s iMessage traffic stats were updated in today’s shareholder meeting:
“Cook revealed that 40 billion iMessages and 15 to 20 million FaceTime calls are made daily”
Whatsapp reports 50b messages daily.
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/28/apple-40-billion-imessages