At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference earlier this week, Hudson Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson said this about Apple (AAPL):
“They don’t have anything in the cloud to speak of, and the stuff they have in the cloud I think is largely not good. I just don’t think they think about data and the cloud in the way you need to think about things.”
Wilson was explaining why Apple by 2020 will be overtaken by Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB) and a third company to be named later, but preferable one — like Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, Kickstarter or 10gen — in which he’s heavily invested.
Asymco’s Horace Dediu responded Friday with a list, a chart and a challenge.
This is what “Not getting the Cloud” looks like,” he wrote above the attached chart, adding that that in the past 12 months Apple obtained:
• 800 million iTunes users and
• an estimated 450 million iCloud users spending
• $3 billion/yr for end-user services plus
• $4.7 billion/yr for licensing and other income which includes
• more than $1 billion/yr paid by Google for traffic through Apple devices and
• $13 billion/yr in app transactions of which
• $9 billion/yr was paid to developers and
• $3.9 billion/yr was retained as operating budget and profit for the App Store. In addition,
• $2.7 billion/yr in music download sales and
• more than $1 billion/yr in Apple TV (aka Apple’s Kindle) and video sales and
• $1 billion/yr in eBooks sold
“This is what can be deduced from a reading of Apple’s financial statements of operations,” Dediu concludes. “If there are comparable details for companies which do get the cloud, I’ll be happy to tally the comparison so we can calibrate this failure.”
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Fred Wilson writes off Apple, and not for the first time
Measuring Not Getting the Cloud