It’s important to recognize that observations and insights are not the same thing.
Observations are raw data, the gradual accumulation of research information that you have consciously and carefully recorded—exactly the way you way you saw or heard it, with no interpretation.
Insights are the sudden realizations—sometimes described as “Aha!” or “Eureka!” moments—that happen when you interpretthe observations and discover unexpected patterns.
Patterns that reveal gaps between where people are and where they’d ideally like to be—between their current reality and their desires. Rifts between the way something is now and the way people assume it should be.
Wherever there’s tension (observation), there’s a gap. If you can spot the gap (insight), you can fill the void (opportunity).
To effectively pitch a disruptive idea, you need to persuade your audience that the changes deliver clear advantages to the people who will use and implement the solution. You need to shift the focus of your audience from the need for disruptive change to the motivation for disruptive change.
Exclusive Apple's iOS mobile operating system runs web applications at significantly slower speeds when they're launched from the iPhone or iPad home screen as opposed to in the Apple Safari browser, and at the same time, the operating system hampers the performance of these apps in other ways, according to tests from multiple developers and The Register.
It's unclear whether these are accidental bugs or issues consciously introduced by Apple. But the end result is that, at least in some ways, the iOS platform makes it harder for web apps to replace native applications distributed through the Apple App Store, where the company takes a 30 per cent cut of all applications sold. Whereas native apps can only run on Apple's operating system, web apps – built with standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - can run on any device.
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Click to enlarge. Source: Canaccord Genuity and IDC
The two paragraphs that jumped out at us were the ones that talked about the company's ability not just to innovate, but to turn those innovations into cash.
For example, he writes, Apple sold 17 million mobile handsets in the first half of 2010, compared with 400 million handsets sold by Nokia (NOK), Samsung and LG. Yet it pulled in 39% of the industry's profit during that period, more than the 32% earned by the world's three largest handset makers combined.
To get a sense of the enormity of this disparity you really have to see it in pie chart form (an earlier version of which failed to include "Others.") Meanwhile, to give you a feel for how hot Walkley is for Apple, we've pasted the text of the two paragraphs that caught our eye below the fold.
We are also impressed with Apple's ability to monetize its innovative products through selling high-margin consumer products that drive strong earnings results and growth trends for Apple shareholders. A case in point is the mobile phone market, where most handset OEMs struggle to post a profit or even 10% operating margins (except RIM and recently HTC), while we estimate Apple boasts roughly 50% gross margin and 30%+ operating margin for its iPhone products.
In fact, Nokia, Samsung and LG combined sold roughly 400M mobile handsets worldwide in the first half of 2010 with a combined value share of 32% of handset industry profits, while Apple sold roughly 17M units over the same time period and captured an estimated 39% of industry profits, or greater than the top three global handset OEMs combined. Apple leads the industry in every metric except for unit share...
