I'm neither here nor there on the article. On the surface there's little I can argue with. But the reality is that Apple makes the lions share of profit in the industry and that is unlikely to change any time soon.
It /is/ bizarre that Apple is all of a sudden behaving like they are under threat though. Seems strange that Tim Cook seems to stick to "We don't worry about what everybody else is doing, we just want to build great products" while Schiller goes on the attack.
On the other hand how long can the other android guys keep losing money hand over fist and will samsung keep using android when tizen or whatever else they've got becomes mature?
Didn't samsung try to distance themselves and their galaxy name from android in their recent S4 presentation?
Phil Schiller is Apple's marketing head. It's his job so manipulate Apple (and Android's) public image. IIRC, he regularly mocks Android and has done so for several years (see this link from 2011 [1])
Just ignoring the rest of the article and whether or not he is right, I'm just going to pick on this quote: "So many of [Apple's competitors] complained that Apple's music player lacked features like FM radio and was overall too simple. But simple, particularly sync, is what people wanted -- and features like super-long battery life and smaller size. As an analyst then, I consulted with several companies certain they could beat iPod with more features. But they missed the fundamentals."
I think it's funny that he doesn't seem to want to acknowledge how wrong he was. He says that what consumers wanted was simple/easy, long battery life and small size. His advice to his clients was to focus on more features. His clients apparently listened to him and therefore the fault lies with them?
Showing us how wrong he has been in the past but without wanting to admit it is really not helping him come across as more believable.
