ThinkVein

Today I’m launching a new blog called StrategyVein.com. It became clear that the scope of ThinkVein was fragmenting between an appreciation of creativity and a deep interest in business strategy and technology. For this reason, I will use StrategyVein to focus solely on business strategy and it’s application to industries of interest.

To begin, I’m publishing two articles on platform strategy entitled ‘Dynamics of Standards Wars‘ and ‘Platform leadership strategies‘. You can expect future articles to include ‘Market entry via intermediation’, ‘Open source strategy’ and ‘Social drivers within open source communities’.

A side purpose of the blog is to incentivize myself to read more and to synthesize my cognitive ideas into written and articulated thoughts. As always, I’m super keen to engage in discussion with others and learn of new perspectives – so do jump into the comments section over on StrategyVein.

Morgan Stanley has upgraded Apple shares on Tuesday, stating that any risk associated with their core Mac business will be offset by future iPhone growth.

Considering that they have captured 1% of the mobile phone market in 3 years, with essentially one product offering – they clearly have a hot product on their hands. To put this in perspective, the iPhone accounted for 30% of Apple’s Earning Per Share (EPS) last year. If Morgan Stanley’s predictions are correct, Apple will sell 36.2 million iPhones in 2010; representing a 3% share of the worldwide mobile phone market. This will represent 50% of Apple’s EPS in 2010! Clearly, the iPhone represents a huge growth opportunity for Apple.

However, I see some significant weaknesses to Apple’s strategy. Their exclusive partnership with mobile phone carriers is a key weakness; resulting in significantly higher subscription fees for consumers. I believe Apple need to abandon their exclusive partnerships and offer customers cheaper contracts – a key driving factor for mobile phone sales.

For a detailed report see the AppleInsider article.