Gene Munster tells a Good Story, But is it Believable?
I definitely don’t agree with Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who believes that iPhone will be the dominant mobile platform. Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget was right to argue that Apple’s mobile phone business would go the same way as the Mac did in the 1980s and 1990s.I made the same case three months ago in the second of the three-linked Betanews stories below:
- Apple and Microsoft beware: Google will be an unstoppable force in mobility
- iPhone cannot win the smartphone wars
- iPhone’s global business is more marketing myth than reality
I’m a big fan of iPhone as a platform concept, but it’s going nowhere as a closed system—not unless that much-rumored Apple tablet is mass-market groundbreaking. Android is cued as the operating system that everybody else will license to compete with iPhone, just like PC manufacturers did with Windows in the 1980s and 1990s.
The problem with analysts like Munster: They don’t think globally. Their perspective is ethnocentric United States—or at best North America. Globally, mobile priorities in many emerging markets are more basic than 110,000 mobile applications. The iPhone may have revolutionized the market for smartphones, but it’s a boutique brand. Android will rule the day.
But what is Munster going to say? The disclosure information released by SAI makes clear that Piper Jaffray will “buy and sell the securities of these companies on a principal basis,” with Apple first on the alphabetical list. Can you say, “Conflict of interest?” Analysts investing in companies that write, or talk, about going oddly—and that’s badly—together.
Do you have an iPhone story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.
