The big three tech companies are generating all kinds of
news right now, and all for completely different reasons.
A research company released their annual list of the world’s
most popular brands, and had all the news agencies talking about Apple’s ‘dethroning’.
After three years atop the list, they were surpassed this year by Google. Is
anyone really surprised? Google Glass, self driving cars, and balloons that
bring wifi to everyone vs. iPhones, iPads and iPods that we've all seen before. Which would you choose? As well, 6 of the top 10 brands come from the tech sector (Google, Apple, IBM,
Microsoft, AT&T and Amazon) proving that it is alive and well.
Continuing with the Apple buzz, there are lots of rumours
going around. They have their keynote speech at the WWDC (Worldwide Developers
Conference) on June 2nd, and lots of sources are saying there is new
hardware being released. Ideas that are being thrown around are a smartwatch,
Apple HDTV, the iPhone 6 or a version of the MacBook Air with Retina display.
Considering that every conference for the past 1-2 years has had rumours that
Apple would release a smartwatch, I’ll believe it when I see it. There are also
rumours that they are considering releasing iTunes or iTunes Radio for Android,
to try and compete with music streaming services such as Spotify. Although Spotify
is gaining in popularity, according to their own website, only ¼ of users are
paying for the service, and they still haven’t figured out how to make a
profit. I suppose Apple is getting worried because single song purchases declined 12%
for the first couple months of this year, and they may need to come up with
something new.
This brings us to the biggest Apple rumour of the week
(although it’s pretty certain). Apple is apparently going to buy Beats by Dr.
Dre, for $3.2 billion, which has a lot of people trying to figure out why. Part
of it has to do with what I mentioned above, with Apple trying to get into
streaming music. Beats Music is a similar service that supposedly has
10,000-20,000 subscribers after 3 months on the market, although some say that’s
fairly low considering the extensive advertising they’ve run for it. With this
deal Apple also gets a company that is considered both fashion and electronics.
The headphones are sold at a high premium, not for the quality, but for the
brand name. By 2013, after 5 years on the market, Beats had cornered 59% of the
market for headphones that cost more than $99. Some are speculating that Dr.Dre
and Jimmy Iovine (who is a huge name in the music producing industry and
co-founded Beats) would join Apple’s executive team. There are certainly all
kinds of reasons this does and does not make sense, but we will have to see it
unfold in the next couple of months. I’m curious to see how Apple will handle managing
another brand (since the Apple brand is the key to its success) and how much of
Beats it will dismantle. This would definitely be their largest acquisition ever
(biggest to date is $400 million for NeXT, which brought Steve Jobs back),
although it pales in comparison to Facebook’s $19 billion for WhatsApp.
Now amidst all of the Apple rumours, Microsoft announced the
new Surface Pro 3. This is a bit of a surprise considering they released the
Surface Pro 2 around 8 months ago (October 2013), and the original Surface Pro a
year before that (October 2012). Personally, I have the original Pro, I
use it daily and it works great. But if you are looking for something new, the
Pro 3 comes with a larger 12” display, has a wide-ranging kickstand and is thinner and lighter. With this
model they are really looking to convince consumers that it can be their one
and only device, both a tablet and a laptop. They’ve moved the Windows button
to the right side, encouraging users to use it in portrait mode (very iPad
like), and they’ve released a newer keyboard and stylus. The main theme in
their presentation was, why choose between a tablet and a laptop when you can
have both in one device?
Lastly, I wanted to mention an interesting piece of news
that got hidden amongst everything else this week. China banned the
installation of Windows 8 on government computers, saying that they were
ensuring computer security. They were previously running Windows XP and have
been slowly converting to Windows 7. This is a blow for Microsoft who continues
to try and increase the share of computers running Windows 8, which currently sits at around 12%.
Lots to look forward to in the coming months, enjoy!
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