Product Renewal: Apple’s Jobs Unveils New IPhone to Dial Back Android Rivalry

Product lifecycle management is one of the key elements of marketing. As technology evolves rapidly today, tech products’ lifecycles become increasingly short and, therefore, renewal of product vitality becomes critically important. Apple inc.’s Steve Jobs has been extremely successful in bringing into the market very cool products such as iPhone and iPad. Marketers have a lot to gain by following his product lifecycle management strategies, with one being tapping into the enormous resources of third party applications developers and the other being introducing to the market the new versions of the products. The company now has more than 225,000 tools, games and other applications available for downloading. That compares with about 50,000 for Android. Recent research shows that more than 5 billion programs have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store. On the other hand, Steve Jobs showed to the market ra week ago a thinner iPhone with a sharper screen and video-chat features, delivering a refashioned chassis and 100 new features…


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Apple Unveils Ad Platform and Phone Software

To better cultivate its apps ecosystem, Apple demonstrated its iAd which places ads on applications so that the third-party apps developers do not have to worry about building advertising components in their applications and placing ads themselves. Mr. Jobs says. “We have figured out how to do interactive video content without ever taking you out of the app… We think people are going to be a lot more interested in clicking on these things.” Apple will host the ads and give developers 60 percent of the ad revenues, keeping 40 percent…


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iPad for Enterprise?

My students at University of Washington are fascinated by customer perception. If customer perception is more or less mysterious to you as well, take a look at that of iPad. It is supposed to be about web surfing, email and photo and movie watching experience for consumers, according to Apple’s promotion campaign. Customers, however, want a stretch – taking it into an enterprise product category. With over 150,000 applications already produced and much more on the way, customers’ “wrong” perception has a pretty good chance to be proven right…


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Can Apple Stay Ahead of Google?

Competition between Apple and Google has arrived at a more adversarial phase marked by Nexus One’s entrance into mobile phone market. Apple has a substantial lead in establishing this ecosystem. Developers have created more than 125,000 mobile applications for Apple devices—seven times as many as exist on Android—and the endless diversity of apps has helped the iPhone quickly pick up 14% of smartphone share. However, it is yet to figure out strategy to help app developers make money and attract large number of mobile advertisers to complete the ecosystem and create a bandwagon effect…

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