Microsoft’s recent high-profile ad campaign featuring the American comic Jerry Seinfeld was not the success the company had hoped it would be. Responses were lukewarm at best, with most finding the ad to be slightly laboured and quite unfunny, like some awkward middle-aged attempt at quirky offbeat cool (read the original relevant blog post in our archive).
Anyway Valleywag has confirmed that as of tomorrow Microsoft will officially announce the termination of the working relationship with Jerry Seinfeld, stating that it had always planned only a brief working connection, and instead now focus on the new ad campaign, unveiled last week. Question is: is it any better than the old one? Or does the change of tact simply smack of panic and…
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Here’s an interesting statistic: Apple’s 2008 sales estimate for the iPhone is 10m, while the global mobile phone market as a whole is expected to shift 1bn handsets in the same period. Therefore, assuming these estimates end up being at least somewhat accurate, the iPhone will account for only 1% of mobile phone sales in 2008.
Question is; if the actual sales are relatively low (as they clearly are), how come the iPhone is pretty much far and away the most recognisable and ‘famous’ model out there?
With Apple having this week announced the details of their forthcoming updated and cheaper iPhone it seems a good time to consider this question. There is a range of possible explanations:
Hypothesis 1 - The iPhone…
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iPhone SDK
Apple’s Software Development Kit for the iPhone is/was due out sometime this month, based on the company’s initial projections for a release date, announced at the end of 2007. The SDK will allow third-party applications to be created for the iPhone, and will hopefully (for Apple) establish them as the leading smart-phone open platform. However, with just over one week of February remaining, no specific date is yet known and instead we are faced by a strange situation whereby details have become oddly tricky to establish…
The current state of play is that Apple never set a single date for the SDK launch, but rather initially announced February as the release period. Latest rumours have suggested that the SDK’s arrival…
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