Apple on Android’s market share: ‘Does a unit of market share matter if it’s not being used?’

A new article by Bloomberg Businessweek today has Apple execs Tim Cook, Jony Ive, and Craig Federighi talking candidly about their business and competitors.

The new iPhone 5C and 5S are coming out tomorrow – pre-orders numbers are not known yet – but demand and lineups will most likely happen. In the report, Cook states that “we never had an objective to sell a low-cost phone… Our primary objective is to sell a great phone and provide a great experience, and we figured out a way to do it at a lower cost.” Many rumours surfaced online before its launch that the cheaper iPhone would come in under $300 outright – but, the base price for the 16GB 5C is set at $599, which is only $120 less than the 16GB iPhone 5S. Low cost and competing on price is where Android is playing, and Cook notes that “There’s always a large junk part of the market… We’re not in the junk business.”

With the rise of Android, Cook says that “I think it’s even more a two-operating-system world today than it was before… when you look at things like customer satisfaction and usage, you see the gap between Android and iOS being huge.” However, Cook slams Google and says that people buy Android devices, but the ones they are using have an Apple logo on the back. “Does a unit of market share matter if it’s not being used? For us, it matters that people use our products. We really want to enrich people’s lives, and you can’t enrich somebody’s life if the product is in the drawer.”

Finally. Innovation. The article started off saying that “Apple is doomed.” Many analysts have been reporting this and subsequently the stock has dropped. Similar to Steve Jobs, Cook says that “Everybody is trying to adopt Apple’s strategy. We’re not looking for external validation of our strategy, but I think it does suggest that there’s a lot of copying, kind of, on the strategy and that people have recognized that importance… Innovate or die.”

Source: Business Week