Competing with a Mac
asymco.com
asymco.com
It's worth noting that even Christensen didn't think the iPhone would be a success.[0]
[0] http://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-wrong/
You already needed to pay for a phone, so the real price compared to a portable was just how much more expensive the iPhone was compared to a standard mobile phone.
Due to the system with 2 year phone contracts in USA, that extra price was low.
The disruption in the iPhone was technical, social, political and economic.
[0] http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/at-t-8525/4505-6452_7-32...
The functionality was really already there. The "disruption" was aesthetics, marketing and ease-of-use.
And in the end, it's a phone, not a cultural revolution.
While I think this is mostly true (Nokia fans love to point out that every possible smartphone feature appeared on at least one Nokia product which may have shipped in the 1800s), there is one way in which this simply is not true, and it's a way which really did change everything.
The browser.
The difference in 2007 between browsing on the iPhone and browsing on any other phone was kind of like, well, comparing desktop Safari in 2007 to trying to browse in 2007 with Netscape 4. Maybe not quite that good. Phones often had only one font available to them, had very limited CSS support, often had no Javascript support. Windows Phone and the Nokia Communicator were the best of what had been out before then, and to say "they were for nerds" is an understatement. Only nerds would tolerate them.
Look at articles after the iPhone's introduction about data usage -- it absolutely skyrocketed, and it was all being driven by the browser. For the first time people actually had a real web browser in their pocket, and it really did make all the difference.
It wasn't just a phone by any stretch -- what made it disruptive was that browser in combination with the touch UI (by far the best way to use a browser on a pocket-sized screen). Revolutionary, or evolutionary? You can make a case either way, but the iPhone didn't upend the smartphone market just because it was pretty and had great advertisements.
And the fact that the old windows phones crashed daily. Was riddled with bugs (some never got fixed) and from an accessibility point of view was a terrible piece of hardware. Good riddance.
Apple made the smart phone easy to use, and gave it much needed elegance. Over night it turned the smart phone market into a consumer smart phone market.
Now it seems like "most people" have a smartphone of one type or another. That's a huge change.
The iPhone (and smartphones in general) have disrupted multiple markets: * Photography and video * Portable music players * Email and messaging devices * Phones ... and many others
The thought I ran into many times with many people during this "disruption" period basically went along the lines of:
"I could buy a new camera, a video camera, a new iPod, a netbook, GPS device, etc - or I could just get an iPhone."
The old windows mobile was a complete dog. Let's take just one example, individual processes could only be allocated up to 32 megabytes of RAM. Really. That's one reason why it could never have run a decent browser, or really a decent anything else. That alone rendered it fundamentally crippled compared to iOS full 32 bit preemptive multitasking kernel. Yes iOS is fully multitasking, only user apps are restricted in their multitasking privileges by the sand boxing system, but background services have none if those limitations.
It was limitations like this that meant projects like Courier would never have been able to compete with iOS. It's why Microsoft had no choice but to develop an entirely new OS core for their mobile platform, losing crucial years of competitiveness.
Google was lucky. Although Android was never originally intended to use multitouch gestures or an accelerated UI layer, at least it was based on a Linux core so had the fundamental technical underpinnings to support competitive application level services. This gave Android a few years head start on Microsoft, even though they were a few years behind Apple, just enough for them to occupy the low end of the market and eventually mount a credible challenge in the mid and high end.
A disruptive product is one that the public cannot conceive of, such that its introduction alters the standards in an industry.
A better product is the HTC8525[0] over the HTC8500. A disruptive product is the HTC8525 versus the iPhone.
[0]http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/at-t-8525/4505-6452_7-32... - The leading WinMo smartphone in Q4 2006, pre-iPhone.
I can go into detail, but the standard ideas for Disruption tend to be technical in nature whereas the iPhone was a profound multi-faceted assault on the world. There are so many elements of this attack, it's hard to know where to begin, but it was certainly more than just a newfound set of components (a lot of the iPhones physical technology was not new).
But, I hear and agree with your point. Guyzero makes a great post above and it's certainly worth reading :).
If you built a hovercraft, it would destroy the car market, and everyone would expect that. But Blackberry did not expect the iPhone to kill them---there were all sorts of business-y feautures it lacked. "Blackberries are fine!" said RIM's customers.
And that is worth naming, I think. We have a whole jargon around the startup ideal of constant, low-level iteration, when that is precisely what screwed Blackberry.
it's an interesting thought experiment to consider if the iPhone would have succeeded if instead of Apple it had been put out by, say, Danger.
1) The ecosystem did not spring into life with the iPhone; a lot of vendors were unsure initially but there was obviously tremendous benefit to Apple due to the iPod industry.
2) Danger would not have been able to launch the iPhone for a multitude of reasons. Even as a part of Microsoft, they couldn't have done it. I could go really in-depth here, but Microsoft is really bad at Art and Politics, which I would argue were the keys to the iPhones success.
3) The iPhone is a triumph for a number of reasons, but I tend to think the social conventions the iPhone destroyed were the most interesting part. I mean, I was working at AT&T when the iPhone dropped.
Before the iPhone:
* Everything was free phone at the low end and $199 at the top end
* Apps were pre-loaded onto phones
* Carriers drove handset manufacturers choice of OS
* No one ever waited for a phone
* Manufacturers did not care about UI/UX
* Phones sold on spec sheets
After the iPhone:
* Most people forget that the iPhone launched at a price point of $499 with no subsidy. They failed but this was Apple's attempt to kill free phones, and they (sort of) did.
* App store (year 2)
* Manufacturers drove handset sales to Operators (and outside of operators)
* People line up for phones all the time
* Everyone cares about UI/UX
* Phones sell by Operating System (And UI/UX)
I could go on and on. There are so many things that changed because of design decisions by Cupertino.
No, Danger could not have done the iPhone. Not because of technical limitations, but because of politics. Wresting that much power out of such a reinforced fiefdom was a herculean effort with commensurate results.
Appreciate the insight though friend :).
* Everything was free phone at the low end and $199 at the top end
One of my friends bought a Palm Phone.
* Apps were pre-loaded onto phones
This may be true.
* Carriers drove handset manufacturers choice of OS
Maybe handset manufacturers, Palm, Blackberry, Nokia had their own OS.
* No one ever waited for a phone
This may be true.
* Manufacturers did not care about UI/UX
I read lots of reviews where people praised the Nokia UI over the alternatives.
* Phones sold on spec sheets
Spec Sheets?
I really don't think this was true for people I knew. People I knew bought phones as Jewelery. They wanted small size, and long battery life.
Those companies had their own OS but their content, schema and layouts were dictated by carriers. Only phones that were sold outside of carrier shops enjoyed true independence and those were few and far between.
People praised the Nokia UI, but where could you buy a high end Nokia phone when they were locked out of US carriers?
Spec sheets sold. Things like battery life were more important than OS. I think we're in agreement here.
I just think we had a different viewpoint on the industry. I sold thousands - tens of thousands of phones in the mid 2000's so I'm really familiar with the market at that time, but the view from my position is not a consumer viewpoint.
From the book, via Wikipedia:
"Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream."
So the canonical example would be PCs disrupting the market for mainframes or minicomputers. Or as described in the book, less powerful hydraulic excavators disrupting steam-powered excavators. It's a good book, anyone who is interested in the business of technology should read it.
The contradiction is that disruptive products are usually much worse products than the ones they eventually replace. No one who owned a VAX or a mainframe looked at the first IBM PCs and thought that the PC was a "better" product. But the PC started cheaper, stayed cheaper and got better fast enough to displace minicomputers while at the same time opening up an entirely new market for computers that didn't exist before.
So much of this hinges on how you define what "disruptive" means. There's an argument to be made that the iPhone started the trend of phones & tablets disrupting the entire desktop PC industry, starting as "worse" products that eventually replaced the "better" product. I personally don't think you could really say the iPhone "disrupted" Blackberry per se - their relationship is more like early Compaq to IBM where Compaq/Apple put out a much better product that broke down barriers holding the original product back (e.g. Compaq decoupling bus speed from processor speed allowing them to ship a faster computer with an ISA-compatible bus for expansion cards).
Instead, it was obsoletive, like PC vs typewriters - the PC was way more expensive, but could do so much more, and once you had a PC it didn't make much sense to have a typewriter too.
[1]'cheap' initial payment with an expensive mobile contract.
I speak as someone whose first iPhone was a 3G, but I think it's possible that the price drop was part of the plan all along. It was be a smart price segmentation move: get everyone who's unbearably keen to pay a whole lot, then move on to people who are bit less unbearably keen at a slightly lower price.
The iPhone (mandated) plan from AT&T was $20/mo for data, including 200 texts.
Even if I didn't prefer the iPhone, that cost differential was a no-brainer to me.
While BlackBerry was guided to omit consumer features from its enterprise buyers, Nokia never secured enterprise buyers of any significance
I wonder if BlackBerry would've prospered by doubling down on enterprise buyers, maintaining their keyboards, and ignoring the consumer market. From what I can tell, BlackBerry haphazardly attacked the consumer market where Apple was the strongest.
[1] To some extent Blackberry did this. While they did launch consumer models, their enterprise sales force remained strong, and new enterprise-friendly features kept shipping.
The essentially feature-free RAZR flip-phone was $600 without a contract and sold like hotcakes.
In all of Christensen's examples cited in “The Innovator’s Solution”, the incumbents tended to move upmarket at the time the disruption was introduced. In the case of the cellphone industry, the incumbents were moving downmarket.
This is important because it shows that a company wanting to disrupt an industry needs to position themselves at the opposite end of the prevailing market direction.
But simply zagging while the industry is zigging isn't enough - the disrupting company also needs to employ the appropriate strategy at the same time. Hence, if your disruption is targeted to the cheap end of the market, then Christensen's "good enough" strategy is absolutely the correct one. But, if your disruption is targeted to the high end of the market, as Apple's iPhone was, then you better be offering a degree of quality that no one dreamed of offering.
This kind of deflates Christensen's compelling rhetoric somewhat. Before Christensen's books, conventional marketing was that in order to succeed, you should see where the industry is headed, and track in the opposite direction. Position yourself against your competitors, not be like them.
Lazaridis saw the iPhone and the Engineer in him went - the battery won't last and it will bring down the AT&T network with its full fledged browser. Ballmer saw the iPhone and laughed at the $500 price. Both did not see the potential from a changing market's standpoint. Battery tech gets better, hardware, networks and OSes get better every year, and the prices can and do fall.
But some of it was inevitable for Blackberry. There really wasn't any differentiation potential left behind for them. iPhone got the smooth, attractive, computer replacement part. Android got the customizable, ubiquitous, many options, open and the "not iPhone" part. There just wasn't any way for BB to differentiate and win. They could've had a perfectly smooth touch optimized OS with great BB hardware, security suite and BBM etc. and even then their target market would still be limited.
The only way they could've saved themselves was if they had innovated ahead of time. After the iPhone and Android it was game over for them.
To my mind, that's also incredibly ironic because RIM had the dual-CEOs for specifically this reason, to avoid conflict over technical and operational requirements.
Edit: Look what I found!!! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6462453
I think there's really been 3 kinds of smartphones:
1) The Microsoft model - shrink a desktop down into a phone display and since everything is so little now, use a stylus to pick at things on the screen. You can definitely see an older MS smartphone and still see it as being a smartphone.
2) The BB model - optimize for most common use-cases and provide a dedicated set of physical inputs to operate. These days, feature phones pretty much do everything a BB can do, but the interface into the capabilities suck. The classic BB phone is very much a feature phone on steroids. A nicer screen, better input but good hardware build quality and excellent email services. It turns out that turing machines are turing machines and BB eventually figured out you can run other kinds of apps on the devices, but their pedigree is very much an amped up feature phone.
3) The iPhone model. Grids and capacitive touchscreens. Let's be honest here, Android started as a copy of the BB model, early Android phones even had a similar set of input mechanisms.
The iPhone model is interesting in that it was just like the Microsoft model in the sense that it was just a cheap portable computing device where "phone" was just an application on the computer. But unlike Microsoft they didn't just take the obvious route of just shrinking down the desktop into an unusable and fussy tiny screen. They developed a different kind of interface.
Also, if you squint just a tiny little bit, it looks kinda like the mobile interface model that BB used, but instead of a wheel or ball or whatever to navigate and a keyboard to type, they simplified and just did everything on a bigger screen.
Pulling these two influences together into what we have now, and being willing to deal with the tradeoffs (lack of precision input and the "feel" of a keyboard + the reduced battery life and added component cost) was really innovative and daring. It was so impressive that Google completely redirected and pivoted Android from the BB model to the iPhone model.
To connect a Blackberry to your own mail server, you needed expensive software and the enterprise level of network service. While BB did start to offer consumer data plans, you could not use them with your own mail server. When the iPhone came to Canada, I did the math and traded the blackberry for an iPhone.
They had a feature set that was early on, unmatched, and enough developer insight/knowledge and codebase that they could have beat other competitors at the application level for integrated contact/calendar/mail solutions for exchange integration.
Apple was always biding their time, waiting for the right moment for a giant leap forward in consumer satisfaction to become possible; it's the opposite of the incrementalism of the usual disruptive product.
Few companies would consider such an approach because it seems to be a much, much bigger risk, leaping so far forward in consumer satisfaction that you are practically creating a new market.
But there is an enormous leverage opportunity created when you take this approach:
A visionary new product can generate a lot of marketing leverage from a strong sales pitch. It really is better. Using a strong sales pitch for an established "me too" product doesn't generate a lot of marketing leverage. And Apple had the head visionary as head salesperson.
The flip side of the potential sales pitch leverage is that the product can likely only be sold via strong sales pitch. It's too new.
So the best positioned company to take advantage of the strong selling opportunities of the Apple approach is one with a strong brand as an innovator. Upstarts or stodgy old companies won't know how to really pitch the product compellingly, or will be at too large a disadvantage from their non-existent/badly matched brand.
I worry that Apple with Jobs gone will forget to sell their next big innovation strongly enough, and will just rely on their existing customer base and strong brand. It will probably only work well the first time (existing huge base/incredible brand).
I say "I worry" because I want Apple to continue creating products that are great leaps forward, and I don't think they can do so perpetually without acknowledging the huge role that a really strong sales pitch plays in the success of such products.
"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago." -- Fortune, Feb. 19, 1996
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/0...
(1) What is Google Glass disrupting? What are the faulty assumptions about it? ("iPhone was a pocket Mac, not a better phone. Google Glasses is a ____, not a ?")
(2) What are the AI / Machine Learning disrupting? (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, IBM, MS) ("AI is a ____, not a ?")
(3) What are the Kiva Systems robots disrupting? ("Kiva System robots is a ____, not warehouse automation? Not ?")
(4) What are 3D Printers disrupting? Certainly not mass-production factories.
2) Education and reference resources. I now longer have to spend hours and hours looking up information and synthesizing it myself, I can get an AI to do it for me. (crossing fingers that it synthesizes it like I want it to)
3) Thieving, lazy, sloppy warehouse workers (no offense). The amount of stuff that gets stolen and "missing" out of fulfillment centers is astronomical. Plus, it's basically a a task that doesn't require human level intelligence. What do I need to ship? Where is it? Is it in stock?
4) Service Bureaus and Machine Shops. Prototyping physical things is expensive and time consuming and requires lots of skill to do. When making any kind of physical thing, the equivalent of compiling and debugging, is to run off a prototype at a Bureau. It's so onerous a problem that very few organizations even bother to make more than half a dozen physical prototypes of an item before committing to production. In the end, it'll probably just mean more variety of cheap junk we can buy off of Amazon.
(4) will happen, but I think the scope is far too small; again it also has the blinders that does not take advantage of the key insight from the article. With 3D printers, you wouldn't buy products off of Amazon so much as buy licenses to fabrication blueprints to print out a product in your garage, similar to the way you can now buy ebooks, digital music, and digital movies from Amazon without the physical product.
It's a nice idea, but it's just very very far away from happening.
Even relatively simple items right now are not something that are even close to being duplicable in any current or emerging 3d printing tech.
For example, there is nothing on the horizon that will enable me to 3d print the equivalent of a working $5 104-key keyboard.
Now if I want to buy all the electronics and internals and spend a few hours printing and assembling a custom keyboard (because my time is free right?) then yeah, I might be able to 3d print something of use.
I'm actually looking around my office now and every thing I see fits into 1 of two categories
a) Not feasible to 3d print the item e.g. a keyboard
b) Cheaper to buy it and get it some other way e.g. the red Solo cup I'm drinking some water out of
My point in bring up all of this is that the key insight in this article is not about disruption, but about refactoring your base assumptions. When you see 3D printers as to what is really is, but has not yet been, then you start to see other technologies that are coming together to be able to fabricate things in your garage. Yes, that does include being able to print circuitry directly into the printer -- and yes, there are people working on that right now.
This is a lot closer to happening than you think it is :-)
For example tons of people were super excited in 2007 because they had a full unix computer in their pockets. Some had the iPhone and some had a Nokia N810. The difference of course is that Apple remained focused and executed very well over the next 5 years whereas Nokia...
To use Glass as an example, it's simple: it wants to be the primary UI to your data and apps. Today you look at the output on the screen and feed it input via voice and the touch thingy, in a decade it reads your brainwaves. People aren't wed to tapping on flat rectangles any more than they were wed to keyboards and styluses.
But whether it's successful or not? No one knows, because it depends entirely on what Google does over the next 5-10 years.
It's not just a smartphone stuck on your face. It's your constant link to all the information you need.
Only when the product is launched will we learn whether it is disruptive.
Everything. There's never been a portable computing platform as aggressive in integrating with the physical (albeit visual) environment before. It will make what mobile disruption did to desktop computing look like what electronic typewriters did to their mechanical predecessors.
Anything that people currently use their eyes for can and probably will be disrupted.
Shopping: price comparisons in physical shops will be automatic, and no longer make you look like a dick.
Sports: Any team sports will be changed by the immediate knowledge of where all your team is. Any endurance sport will change with the zero-effort monitoring of your vital statistics[1].
Dating: All those "mobile dating apps" that work in theory but kind of fail in the real world might actually have a chance (assuming people get used to people wearing Glass and no longer laugh at them)
[1] No more http://chrisfroomelookingatstems.tumblr.com/
By way of analogy, one could say a car was a faster horse-and-buggy, but an airplane was something new & different. A telegram was a faster form of mail, but a telephone was new & different.
A good example of the lack of insight that kind of question leads to is the apocryphal quote[1] by IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. Even if he didn't say it, the point was that those who shared that view had labelled computers as "massive calculating machines". That was true, but missed the bigger picture.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquot...
Haha, that's a nice piece of rhetorical sophistry.
It is good to keep an open mind on the different possibilities. However, the art of strategic thinking requires you to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Until you can fill in that blank, you can't make decisions right now and place your bets.
That is the point of this exercise. There is a key insight in the article, and it can be applied to something like the Google Glasses. If you cannot discern it, you're more likely to be running off of unexamined emotions instead of a vision of what's to come.
A nice comment somewhere in this thread about CEOs of corps competing to get the best app - Apple managed to turn the iPhone into arguably the premier ego-arena on the planet. A characteristic which gives iOS an allure which should not be underestimated, unless you happen to enjoy being crushed like a bug.
Essentially, I would be shocked if Asymco had a post saying he disagreed with Apple's strategy.
I'll tell you why talking heads/pundits/experts couldn't predict, because they are useless, and the whole business of market disruption prediction is built on a ridiculous premise.
Could it be that it was Android that hurt Blackberry and Nokia more than the iPhone did? Low end Android phones definitely replaced a lot of Symbian phones in the marketplace. It would certainly explain the timing of the change.
>The idea that Apple is vulnerable to the low end is a relic of an idea.
Not seeing how this follows from the data and analysis and seems to be a rather bold claim. There is a real chance of smartphones getting commodotized and it has already happened to a certain extent in China and India, where local OEMs are calling the shots.
The reason it's not happening in the US to the same extent is that the carriers hide the true cost of the flagship phones into two year data contracts, unlike, say PCs. However, the contract free prepaid market is growing at a record pace [1] and we may see a real change in the marketplace if the trend continues. Is the upgrade to S4 or the 5s from the S3 or 4S worth $500?
[1] http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/npd-one-third-us-smartph...
You're also right with how cheap OEM android phones are taking over the market. iOS is losing marketshare pretty much everywhere where phones are not heavily subsidised or the comparative income is low, namely everywhere but the US and UK (and a couple of others). Unless apple drops its ios prices to more reasonable levels (they are really taking the p*ss), it's going to be the same story as the one that unfolded with mac/windows.
If the story does unfold as it did with Mac/Windows, Apple will again be the clear winner, just as they are in the PC market.
Working in corporate and government environments is an Apple free zone.
Lower price competitors have repeatedly caught up and outperformed higher priced vertical companies that make the entire stack. Android is well positioned to do exactly this to Apple over the next decade. Phones and cheaper devices also seem to see this happen repeatedly. Apple's phone division should see a warning in Nokia and RIM, not a comfort.
SGI, Sun, Commodore, Atari, DEC and many others are all defunct. All full stack companies.
Apple and IBM are left. IBM mainframes are extremely difficult to remove. Apple are easier but may survive with enough iOS lock in.
But you'd be very brave to bet on it.
Full stack can be seen as a great advantage. Otherwise Microsoft wouldn't make Surface or acquire Nokia. It all depends on specific business cases.
The point is for general purpose computing full stack was common but is now exceptional. If it was a great advantage surely there would be more full stack companies around.
> Non-full stack companies come and go. That's part of the strength
Or more precisely, that's a benefit of hardware commodity. From the business perspective however, it isn't fun to be a loser, full stack or not.
The non-full stack companies that are gone have been replaced.
The full stack ones have been replaced by combinations of non full stack companies.
New non-full stack companies come in and get big. What new full stack company that matters that has been started in the past decade?
By your logic, non-full stack companies are even harder to keep going.
The ecosystems for more open systems are also really durable.
Personally, watching for decades the most surprising thing is that MS has kept the desktop rather than losing it to Linux.
Would you say that MS has 'won' the server market because they make more money than any Linux company even though Linux has a largest market share of internet servers?
Yet Apple has the most profitable segment of the PC market, they make more profit on PCs than any if their competitors; it turns out Mac-free corp/gov zones are not very profitable.
Apple will keep dominating the high end of even developing markets, their profits will keep rising and they will continue not to be disrupted by Android, who seem to have trouble making money (sans Samsung). I would worry more about HTC going under than Apple.
Apple don't dominate the high end of phones by market share any more. They do make more money out of it than anyone else at the moment. Good for shareholders but consumers are largely indifferent to profitability.
If HTC and Samsung went bankrupt Android would still be OK. They'd be replaced.
Corporate computing is bigger than just buying PCs. Oracle, IBM, service companies, MS, Intel, CA, Cisco and all these companies make masses of money in corporate environments.
There is a word for market share without profits. Failure.
Value is measured in money. Apple creates 45% of the value in the PC industry.
The point isn't whether it was Android or iPhone (for the record, the Droid campaign started fall 2009). The notion of getting disrupted by higher cost phones--not iPhone for a Symbian but a smart phone for a flip phone--was so unthinkable and invisible that for three years the two companies under discussion here made do selling to emerging markets. It's essentially a tale of how the market and leadership at these companies do not see disruptions from above coming, and if they do see them coming being in a paradoxical state of needing to reverse course on a (thus far) successful strategy.
Not seeing how this follows from the data... There is a real chance of smartphones getting commodotized
Nobody is arguing that smart phones haven't been commoditized. The question is, how viable is a business that does not serve the low end? According to critics who are not keen on the nuances between these different products, a high-end play is not viable at all. But this is ignorant of the history of the Mac and iPod. It's also ignorant of the fate of PC-era commodity players.
By the way, I love the last sentence of Horace's piece here: "That’s not likely to be the case for those who found themselves in competition with the Mac in its pocketable re-incaration."--he's hinting at the possibility that these scary "commodity players," even if they see success, set themselves up poorly for the next round of disruption. Apple's whole-widget approach uniquely set it up to introduce disruptive form factors, and might do so again in the future.
I spend time in both countries you mention and couple more in Asia. Local OEMs are calling the shots because market as a whole is growing. But, the smarter OEMs realize that they have to make phones that are less shoddy. That is why you see brands like Oppo. What I have seen in the last couple of years is that as people get busier, they don't have time or patience to handle rubbish phones. They will not mind spending more money to get an iPhone or a Mac. Many analysts in the west try to say something like we Asians buy these gadgets as a status symbol. It might be true to a certain extent, but more people are getting them these because they are tired of cheap and crappy devices.