Steve Jobs’ take on his Competitors - RIM, Android, Tablets and Notebooks

Steve Jobs who normally is not present during most of Apple’s Earnings Conference Call made a special appearance at its recent earnings call with analysts where he spoke majorly about his competitors and was responding to questions posed by analysts on Apple’s future growth prospects and his take on the current market trends.

Known for his candid way of conducting product launch presentations and campaigns, it is quite startling to comprehend that Steve Jobs was not his usual self. It was as though he was reading out from a manuscript making it evident that acoustic presentations are not his forte. He also boasted of Apple’s tremendous Q-IV Revenues whereby they achieved record sales of iPhones and also produced more revenue in a quarter than what Google usually generates in a year. Reports state that he used phrases like “disingenuous,” “smokescreen,” “DOA, dead on arrival,” and “far from the truth” during the earnings call.

The central theme of most of the conversation was staged around his take on Apple’s chief competitors - Research In Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry & Google’s Android and he also threw light on the kind of competition and future that awaits iPads and Apple notebooks. Speaking about RIM, Steve said, “I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future.” This statement of his is backed by his own reasoning that Apple’s existence poses immense competition to RIM which further pressurizes them to think beyond just producing PlayBooks to win the war against iPads.

He also pointed out that it is not easy to rope in the best developers in the technology world who can fabricate something that is as innovative as the iOS and Android. Continuing his take on developers, he sympathized with them by stating “Android is fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day” and this fragmentation has left “a mess” for developers to work with. Steve bragged about his company’s integrated system approach and felt proud of the fact that this integrated style can “trump” fragmented every time.

Moving on he went on to comment on various tablets that would soon hit markets. A clarification of sorts was made by Jobs where he suggested, “not many, but only a few reliable entrants would be launched.” The sad part, however, as per Jobs is that these Tablet-makers are reducing the screen-size by more than 45 percent than a regular tablet, thereby giving rise to Seven-inch tablets which would apparently be too big to compete with smartphones and too small to compete with the iPad.

He prolonged his conversation on iPads and said, “The iPad is clearly going to affect notebook computers and I think the iPad proves now that it’s no longer a question of if but rather a question of when,” thereby signaling the cannibalization of Notebook computers by iPads. He seemed surprised and enthusiastic while speaking about iPads and expressed his views as to how they will be the desired product of a very diversified demographics.