Apple's Enterprise "Trojan Horse" Strategy is Working

Steve Jobs famously argued that he'd rather sell to consumers than businesses, because he'd rather sell directly to an end user than a third party. It would appear that Apple's prospects are improving, in part because enterprises are more lenient these days about allowing some employees to use their own tools. Consumer markets more sustainable

But lately Apple has been able to use a "Trojan Horse" strategy, selling products to lead business buyers who have acquired and prefer Apple products in their roles as consumers. Tablets and iPhones are the two best examples.

 

Millennials Prefer Smaller Companies? Perhaps, But What Does it Mean?

Only seven percent of the Gen-Y generation (some say this is people roughly 18 to 29, other might use a slightly-different age range) works for a Fortune 500 company, according to Millennial Branding.

Some would argue the pattern exists because start-ups better reflect Gen-Y ("Millennial") values.

It is a simple demographic fact that Millennials will represent 75 percent of the workforce by 2025. But some might argue that "culture" and "values" have rather little to do with employment patterns of Millennials.

Since about 1980, enterprises, such as the "Fortune 500" firms, have been employing a smaller number of U.S. workers. Concurrently, there are more and more people working "for themselves," as well.

For example, “owner” is the  fifth most popular Millennial generation job title, according to Millennial Branding.

 Some would say this is because they are an "entrepreneurial" generation. Perhaps there is some truth to that characterization, but one might also note that the numbers and percentages of workers who work for smaller companies, or independently, have been climbing for decades.  Millennials choosing start-ups

So though it is possible that Millennials have a preference for start-ups, it also is possible that this simply is where the jobs are. The entire workforce has shifted since 1980 or so, one might argue.

Mobile Now Drives Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Up to this point, it might have been reasonable to consider the impact of "mobility" on enterprises mostly in relation to remote or distributed work, and separately from other trends, such as "consumerization" or "cloud computing," though all three are related.

Increasingly, though, it is looking as though mobility is now driving cloud adoption. That's new.

When cloud storage provider Box tracks its enterprise sales, it finds there has been a 30-fold increase in the number of enterprise deployments that are mobile-driven.

So while mobile user growth may be up nine times, enterprise activity is producing more revenue growth.

The Box enterprise customer base now includes 82 percent of the Fortune 500, the company says. Mobile drives cloud adoption

That mobile drives enterprise cloud computing adoption should not be surprising. Networked computing has been driving most application trends for some time. Most consumer apps now run in the cloud. And though enterprises can afford to run apps using their own data center infrastructure, it increasingly makes sense to create web interfaces for enterprise apps, whether the facilities are run "in the cloud" or on owned facilities.

Ultrabooks "Versus" Tablets? Sorta

I might be a complete contrarian, but I don't believe notebooks and tablets are "product substitutes." Most people do think about it that way, and there is a clear logic for doing so.

Will people spend incremental cash on a tablet or a PC? Yes. Will tablets displace many PCs in the workplace? Yes. Will tablets displace many PCs in consumer environments? Yes.

Given my agreement with all those propositions, why do I think tablets are, in fact, not replacements for PCs? For the same reason a high-end Lexus is not a product substitute for a SmartCar. It is true that both provide "transportation," but so do skateboards, bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles, buses, airplanes and trains.

My point is that we have had, for decades, a multi-purpose device, the PC, that has gotten more portable, and now mobile form factors over time. There are some instances where some users have considered even a BlackBerry smart phone a functional substitute for a notebook PC.

I know a few people who claim that, on business trips, they compose articles on BlackBerries. I wouldn't. Most people probably wouldn't, but some do. Smart phones as content consumption devices

Still, there will be many more people who routinely use a tablet as a substitute for a PC, some of the time, most of the time, or nearly all the time. But the notion of "substitute" implies, rather directly, than one product provides equivalent satisfactions for some problem or need.

It might be viewed as a technicality or just "semantics," but I'd argue that, for decades, the ways people use PC devices have changed, though our portals have not, quite so much.

If you at the "birth" of the PC, you will discover that a particular application, namely the spreadsheet, lead to rapid adoption of PCs as ways to enable scenario and modeling exercises by accountants and financial personnel. That generally remains the case: it is applications that create the demand for devices.

What some of us might say is that the tablet starkly illustrates the principle that devices get used because people want to use applications. And what tablets illustrate is the massive shift of application consumption from "work" or "content production" to "entertainment" and "content consumption." Content consumption

It's just that, up to this point, we have not made attractive content consumption devices available. To be sure, most tablet users do some amount of content creation on tablets, but it mostly takes the form of answering emails. Most of the other activities are one form or another of content consumption.

It's a matter of latent user behavior being "uncovered," more than the creation of a new product category, though clearly, that also has happened. As it turns out, most of us, most of the time, seem to use connected PCs to consumer content, and little time "creating" it. Ultrabooks vs tablets

The point is that PCs increasingly get used for content creation ("work"). Tablets get used for most of the other things people do on the Internet, which is consume content. 

Tim Tebow's "Immaculate Reception" in Overtime Against Steelers

Some still are skeptical about Tim Tebow's future as a star National Football League player. On the first play of overtime, with a new rule barring "sudden death" victories, Tebow took the first snap and did the only thing a team can do, on offense, to win a game "sudden death" style: score a touchdown.

He's got the problems many say he has. But he's clearly progressing fast. There's something else, though. The whole team plays better when he's on the field. It's a total team effort. It's an intangible, but it seems to be "real."

6 Most Important Non-Profit Communication Channels

Half of the top-six marketing and donor communications activities non-profits will use in 2012 require the use of broadband access. The other three partially use broadband access. Non-profit Marketing in 2012

Cutting the Video Cord Sounds "Good" to Some, But Isn't a Perfect Substitute

Around 80 percent of what most Americans watch on TV can be had for free, some would argue. Some of us would say that is a pretty big and overly-broad generalization. But keep in mind there is an 80-20 rule.

The 20 percent of programming people really cannot get "for free" includes what many would consider the "most valuable" programming.

Also, few people really seem to be willing to live with their video subscriptions, at the moment.

About nine percent of U.S. respondents to a Deloitte  survey say they have stopped buying video entertainment subscriptions from cable, telco or satellite providers, while another 11 percent report they are considering doing so.  Nine percent have cut the video cord

Cable providers lost about 1.77 million subscribers over the past year, similar to 1.76 million lost in 2010, according to Leichtman Research Group. But cable industry losses are virtually directly balanced by subscribers gained by telco and satellite providers.

The implication is fairly clear: video cord cutting remains largely a potential danger, not a current reality.

Telcos added 1.53 million video subscribers in 2011, compared to 1.61 million in 2010. Satellite providers added about 480,000 subscribers in 2011 and 930,000 in 2010. 2011 video market was stable, overall.

One complicating factor, Leichtman notes, is that growth traditionally has come from new housing starts. Since housing construction is down, the opportunity to grow the universe of subscribers is stilted. On the other hand, customer churn generally increases when people are moving. To the extent that people are not moving domiciles as much as they have in the past, that should contribute to lower churn.

What those figures do not shed light on is whether average revenue per accounts is stable, rising or dropping. One might argue that new features such as digital video recorder or HDTV are pushing average revenue up, while a desire to save money could be leading some customers to drop premium channels such as HBO.

Evidence seems to have been mixed in the third quarter of 2011. Comcast's basic video ARPU remained flat $72.7 during the period while broadband ARPU increased 2.2 per cent to $42.6. Telephony ARPU declined 2.4 percent from the previous quarter's $31.9.

DirecTV ARPU increased almost two percent from the previous quarter, reaching $92.20. Third quarter 2011 ARPU

Time Warner Cable had declines across the board in ARPU, with the sole exception of broadband.

DISH saw its ARPU decline two percent from the previous quarter, marking the company's first consecutive quarter ARPU decline since the recession in 2009.

AT&T U-verse and FiOS TV ARPUs continued to grow, however. FiOS monthly ARPU increased two percent from the previous quarter and U-verse's monthly ARPU was up 2.5 percent.

The larger point is that though service provider market share is changing, and average revenue per account is mixed, with no clear pattern, there is, at least according to Leichtman Research, no evidence that video cord cutting is happening on anything more than an insignificant level.  
But it always has been clear that some content is "more valuable" to consumers than others. Cable TV executives used to say that "nobody watches more than seven channels; the problem is that each person watches a different seven."
That is why distributors continue to argue that, for all its problems, a "bundled" approach still makes the most financial sense for consumers and suppliers. Cord cutting still minor