Apple head Tim Cook was interviewed yesterday at the D11 Conference and he had some interesting things to say about their main competition. The explosive growth of Android came up, and he doesn’t seem worried. He said, “Winning has never been about making the most” which if you’re reading between the lines, that means quality is more important than quantity. To further clarify, he said, “Arguably, we make the best PC, but we don’t make the most.” On the other hand, he said that they made the best music player and did make the most, but it wasn’t that way from the start.
Cook went on to explain that things aren’t always the way they seem. For example, tablet market share might be fairly close, but when it comes to the web market share there’s no contest, at least for North America. The iPad controls 80% of the web traffic and if you look at worldwide data from both smartphones and tablets, iOS controls nearly 60% of the market.
In a completely unrelated topic, the question came up on porting their own iOS apps to Android. Cook said, “We have no religious issue with porting an Apple app to Android. If it made sense for us to do that, we would do that.” No don’t go thinking that we are going to see iOS apps anytime soon on Android because the key to this statement is “if it made sense”. What he is saying is it hasn’t made sense and it doesn’t make sense now. Sure, if it makes sense in the future they will do it, but a lot will need to happen for that to take place.
Apple and Google are two completely different companies, and although I wouldn’t agree with Cook’s comment that Google isn’t concerned with quality, I think Apple’s plan of attack will continue to work for them. If you’re interested in seeing the complete interview, you can check out the 81 minute video below.
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