heise online broke the press embargo: Freescale hints at Apple netbook - Updated. At least the PR folks should have recognized the Apple desktop.
Surprise, surprise...
What Freescale really wanted you to know comes from a Reuters article:
Henri Richard, Freescale's chief sales and marketing officer, said the torrid growth of the netbook market made it impossible to ignore and that fears of cannibalization are overblown. Any company that refuses to get into the space is "making a huge mistake," he said.
"It's happening, it's there, it's real. And if you're not there to take advantage of it, you're going to miss big," said Richard.
Richard said some are predicting as many as 30 million to 40 million netbook shipments in 2009. DisplaySearch expects netbooks to make up 16 percent of the notebook market by 2011.
Richard, who left AMD in 2007 after spending seven years as head of sales and marketing, said Freescale's netbook offering is seeing "significant interest" from contract computer manufacturers in Taiwan.
"Since those guys never develop anything unless they have customers behind them, that must mean that some large market players are looking at the technology," he said.
Well, the good news is, after all this time, Freescale is beginning to understand they cannot afford to miss. The consumer market is the only large market for microelectronics on the horizon. What they ought to do now is join the Open Handset Alliance and figure out how to work more closely with Google (NASDAQ:GOOG).
There will probably be a few more surprises this week with CES and Macworld on the calendar. Imagine these two events being scheduled at the same time (same week). Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) does not appear to be concerned (Steve Jobs is probably not speaking at CES either). Do you think the IBM (NYSE:IBM) folks will finally pick up on this trend of growing confidence at Apple?
Apple's consumer-centric strategy starts with the consumer and not the datacenter. Sure, the whole cloud concept is great, but there will be many clouds in the sky and only one device in the hands of the user. The next iPhone/iPod Touch is coming with iTunes, and the App Store, and everything else Apple can conceive/coordinate, all in one nice big package of me (.com). It is time to start to think about that. This is no longer a commodity computer business.
It seems the resolution is finally there and that is great for us. In 2009, more than systems are needed to sell silicon and we are ready to get moving in that direction. Thank you Freescale for understanding the opportunity. Let's do it!
The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!
12 comments:
You are so right on. I think this is why IBM is pushing the new semiconductor alliance at the 32nm level. They will need something more than Lotus Notes to sell software and services.
BTW, where is my efika2?!
Sam
I agree. How could a _technology company_ publish a image of a netbook with a Apple desktop and Apple icons and not expect the newspapers to think it was Apple? Duh.
Forget Freescale and the money hungry investors that bought them. The people that work there don't care. They have jobs. The good people left. The investors live in dreamland. Come on! Do something!
If it was me (and a billion dollars in venture capital), I'd acquire the trademarks to both Commodore and Amiga, pretty much replicate what Apple has done in the last 10 years and get warm and cozy with Google to deliver some very awesome consumer electronic devices ranging from desktop computers to handhelds.
ahahhaha, again Commodore and Amiga... please we live in 2009!!
> If it was me (and a billion dollars in venture capital), I'd
> acquire the trademarks to both Commodore and Amiga, pretty much
> replicate what Apple has done in the last 10 years
You mean make an MP3 player and run a successful music store?
You may as well make up your own brand and save the cash, because you'd need it to back up your company when it failed to make an impact against iPod/iTunes.
..."ahahhaha, again Commodore and Amiga... please we live in 2009!!"...
And your point being??!
u r talkin about brands no one uder 30y 's able to remember. C= & Amiga are only dust 'n bones for old nerds... today marketing money value: ZERO
We still believe...
..."u r talkin about brands no one uder 30y 's able to remember. C= & Amiga are only dust 'n bones for old nerds... today marketing money value: ZERO"...
YES, exactly my point... a brand and platform the younglings more than likely never heard of and a brand and platform the the old timers still rave about. No better combination than the above said. It is far easier to rebuild a brand that is already considered a household name than to dream up a new one that will most likely fail.
Dude, you can sell ice to eskimos with the right marketing strategy!
> Dude, you can sell ice to eskimos
> with the right marketing strategy!
That explains global warming and the melting of the arctic shelf :)
What you need to do is make a product people will buy. They will buy it whatever name is on it. There is no marketing value in calling it Amiga - it will only serve to annoy the die-hards when it's nothing to do with the original, and confuse anyone who looks for Amiga on Google, and finds all this cruft in the history.
Apple made a splash with the worst named products ever. I mean, iWhatever isn't exactly inspired.
With regards to using Amiga-like operating systems and Amiga-inspired technology; no problem with that. MorphOS and AmigaOS 4.x have their benefits. You might notice stuff at Las Vegas CES this year where some audio system or media hardware has this tiny, fancy display built in (check out this beauty) - this is a perfect target for MorphOS for example. Cheaper than Linux (which is free only if it magically supports everything you want out of the box; it rarely does on a new design), faster than Linux, less resource-hungry than Linux.
We all know these kinds of products will sell far, far in excess of anything on the desktop market, possibly more than the portable market too (although the numbers won't be very exciting inside the "speaker system" market, that is by-the-by).
But in the end what OS it runs is moot, since the user will not be using it for anything but the actions you want them to perform.
(Genesi usually has a different tack, we make systems that we want you to do something with, but really don't care - or, more precisely we DO care and this is the whole point of the community building - what you want to run on it. If it comes with MorphOS or Linux, you can install the other, port another OS, make it do some complex stuff we never thought of, or make some complex stuff someone else already thought of - it's all about the community and community enablement.)
Going back to IBM; IBM are pushing the new semiconductor alliance so that they can make 32nm processors for customers like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, and push their high end servers based on POWER6 and Cell. They're not, not even in the slightest bit, concerned about anything that sells at Best Buy on their own terms. If you can design a product that needs 50 million chips a year they will design something for you on 32nm, and you can sell it where you like. But they have absolutely no interest outside of offering the best semiconductor design and fabrication facilities, or what your product actually is.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary
:-)
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