I don't dispute that. By concentrating on one product, you have a polished product. I also need to add that HTC is brain dead when all they put is a 1300 mah battery on that EVO.
On the other hand, if you make mistakes on that product like Apple's, its very hard to remedy the design faults until next year.
If HTC screws up in one model, two months later, they have another model that fixes it up. This is the China-Taiwan model of success---Asus, Acer, MSI and so on, all use this same business strategy. And for that they are extremely successful. Recent surveys point to Lenovo now having the most reliable notebooks now, followed by Asus, who used to be no. 2. Apple is no. 3. The mistakes done on the Google Nexus One design, the HTC Desire fixed it two months after. The China-Taiwan model of business and product improvement is flawed but it is relentless. Against them, Apple is on the defensive, not offensive. Understanding strategy, once you're forced in a defensive position, you are in a fundamental disadvantage.
The problem of the iPhone 4---those specs will stay the same for the entire year. For me right now, the iPhone 4 seems better than any Android phone---except when the next month or the month after that. The 960x640 resolution is brilliant, but the 3.5" screen where phones are hitting with 4 to 5", lack of transreflective coatings (like what Nokia N series and Blackberry uses) and AMOLED will haunt it till next year. And again, no Verizon, no Sprint, and no physical keyboard.
Physical keyboards still matters. For a supposedly touch screen platform, where many of its hottest phones are all tousch screen models, 54% of Androids sold have physical keyboards. Blackberry, with its physical keyboards, still has an enormous market margin share over the iPhone.
Here is one thing about mobile. Unlike other computer forms, mobile is far more personal. That is, it is individually sensitive to your uniqueness. You're going to hit limits when you keep selling one model. Case in history. Henry Ford and the Ford Model T. Every Model T is uniform, and its all black. He had the perfect product, perfect mass production to keep prices low, the perfect logistic infrastructure---heck parts are so easily obtainable to fix Model Ts everywhere you go in the wide USA. The Model T is the model of functional efficiency.
Then came GM, which had introduced a wide variety of models, starting with Chevrolet, then Buick, then Oldsmobile and so on. They had style, they had coupes, they had everything. And the market shifted from Ford to GM. GM became number 1, as Ford shifted from its one Model strategy to that of many.
That's it. Cars are very personal. Each car is a reflection of the owners. The variety of individuals create the variety of cars.
This is the same case of mobile. That's why successful mobile companies, (Nokia moves 400 million each year, Samsung 270 million each year, LG over 110 million, while Apple moves 24 million) have an enormous variety of models. Because mobile is extremely personal. People want choices. They want choices on their phone design, form factor, price points, colors and carriers, and this level of choice even precedes that of having choices for apps.
Apple is okay and still is in a growth pattern because it still only has 2% of the entire handset market. I argued before it is far from its full market potential yet. But there will be limits when it starts growing big. At some point to grow further you will need more personal differentiation.
I don't go to Best Buy, but I tell you, in Asian tech malls, you see small stores, lots of small stores, where under the glass, you have dozens and dozens of different Nokias, Samsungs, LGs, HTCs, all sorts of models you will never see in the US or see in such numbers in the US. Unlocked phones. You can have a Nokia N900 here, next to it, an HTC HD2, next to it a Nokia N97 Mini, with a price tags and a smiling lady on top. You pay, you put your SIM, and you can be using the phone before you leave the mall.
