[bwilson4web]

This struck home in more than just the Smartphone market:

. . .
It appears to be a widely held viewpoint3 that there’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS: because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale, they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible. If that’s really the case, the phone manufacturers are spectacularly dumb: ignoring the 2 year contract cycle & abandoning your users isn’t going to engender much loyalty when they do buy a new phone. Further, it’s been fairly well established that Apple also really only makes money from hardware sales, and yet their long term update support is excellent (see chart).

In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one. Then again, all of this may be ascribing motives and intent where none exist - it’s entirely possible that the root cause of the problem is just flat-out bad management (and/or the aforementioned spectacular dumbness).
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http://theunderstatement.com/

We have four, working, Macintoshes because they work. We've only sold the 128k Mac and a DOS PC sold with good riddance. At work, I use PCs that are provided for my work but when I get my hands on surplus PCs, they become Linux boxes and must more usable.

In some respects, the brilliance of Honda and Toyota was to engender buyer loyalty. This loyalty over time led to repeat business that advertising can not buy. A fan of "Firesign Theater," 40 years later their 'commercials' are just as relevant today as they were then and remembered tomorrow.

Bob Wilson