Stop Doubting ⇥ stratechery.com

Great piece from Ben Thompson:

Step back five years or so, and there were legitimate strategic questions about the iPhone: probably the two most popular were whether or not the iPhone could maintain its average selling price (ASP) or if it needed to go down-market, and whether or not Android would overwhelm the iPhone from a marketshare perspective and thus, over time, win over the complementary parts of the iPhone’s ecosystem (especially developers). As long-time readers know, I consistently argued that neither would happen — iOS and its ecosystem would continue to provide significant differentiation that maintained ASP, there were far more wealthy customers in large developing countries like China than average income numbers would suggest, and that these two factors would perpetuate the ecosystem’s allegiance to iOS — but I could at least respect that the thinking behind these objections was grounded in a cogent analytical framework (that just happened to be wrong).

On the other hand, I have a much more difficult time being respectful about today’s bear arguments that basically boil down “the iPhone was too successful previously” or, perhaps more accurately, “just because.” If you want to argue that the iPhone will be less successful than it has been previously, ground it in something other than your vague intuition!