iPhone5 does not Wow

iPhone5 is thinner, bigger, faster and has more battery life. There are more apps, Facebook is more deeply integrated and Siri has been enhanced further.  The wave of innovation that started with new magical touch interface and apps that led to phenomenal usage on iPhone, is now abating.  Siri which promised another round of innovation with its voice interface and deep integration with existing apps on the device, has not yet made the same impact as Touch interface did. iPhone5 is almost guaranteed to be the best selling iPhone ever and most selling smartphone. The question is “is that enough”. As a customer, it does not matter - I still get the best product albiet at a high price.  As an investor, I care about long term growth and profitability, while share price moves to near term sales potential.

Apple needs to keep the innovation engine rolling, for margins to stay at current levels. The big challenge facing Apple is the open source, Android and copy cat apps on Android. To protect and preserve long term growth and margins, we may see more instances of legal suits between Apple and Android vendors. That said; it is very hard to control the onslaught of free and open source.  

·         Governments and large companies don’t prefer getting locked in to a proprietary and closed system like iOS. We saw a brief upsurge in Linux as Governments and Government owned institutions backed Linux.

·         However, unlike Linux, Android has the support of application developers and device manufacturers.  

·         Android is already dominating traffic across the emerging countries.  World is more web centric than it was a decade ago.

Can Apple innovate fast enough to maintain a strong lead over competition? iPhone5 disappoints on this metric. If Apple fails again, price competition will soon destroy Apple’s margins or worse, Apple may lose market share.

Is it Hard to Customize Mailer Content?

A bank sent a promotional mailer on “Get a term cover of Rs. 1 cr for Rs 8600/- PA”. It was a well crafted mailer with photograph of a young, dynamic gentleman holding a Play Card with “My Family” written on it and a smile with an exclamation mark.  All designed to catch attention and appeal to the feelings for family members – the right emotion to drive purchase of an insurance policy. 

Only catch was that the insurance premium of Rs. 8600/- PA was applicable to a 25 year, non smoker male with 30 year premium paying term.  And the mail was sent to a 35yrs+ old, female.  The recipient was an active customer of the bank and bank had all the demographic details in their records. 

It could have easily customized the mailer content, by replacing the Gentleman holding the play card with a lady, providing the real premium applicable to the recipient, instead of doing a mass broadcast of the mail.  For an interested customer, it could have been a single click purchase, landing on the login page of the bank, to make the payment of the insurance policy and so on.  The task required was to create two creatives and use dynamic variables from a look up table that can populate the premium values basis the age and the gender with all the caveats.  I bet this would have led to more conversions. 

Do share your thoughts on this topic.