So this week has just been a lot, numbers-wise. I spent about twenty minutes on Tuesday trying to wrap my head around Apple's quarter and I'm still not sure I did. $39.2 billion in revenue. $11.6 billion in profit. For three months. They sold 35.1 million iPhones between January and March, which is up 88 percent from the same quarter last year, and that's supposed to be the "slow" quarter before a new iPhone shows up. iPad sales more than doubled too, 11.8 million units. I read that on the train and just kind of stared out the window for a minute.
And then today Nokia goes and reports the exact opposite kind of quarter. Smartphone sales down 52 percent year over year, total phone sales down 29 percent, and they're looking at something like a $1.8 billion loss for the year. Two companies making phones, same three months, completely different planets. I keep seeing people frame this as some kind of morality tale about design or ecosystems or whatever, and maybe it is, but mostly it just looks like what happens when one company ships a phone people already own three of and another company is still trying to convince anyone the Lumia 900 is worth switching for. It IS apparently doing well on Amazon right now, best-selling phone on there last I checked, so its not nothing. Just not enough, fast enough.
Honestly the thing I keep refreshing my browser for isnt either of those. Its the Pebble.
If you havent seen this, some guys in Palo Alto put a smartwatch on Kickstarter on April 11th. Hit their $100,000 goal in about two hours. By day six they were past $4.7 million, which made it the biggest Kickstarter project ever at that point, and then a week or so after that they blew past $3.3 million... wait, no, they blew past the old $3.3 million site record entirely, with something like a month still left on the clock. I backed it for $99, e-ink display, syncs to your phone over Bluetooth, shows texts and caller ID on your wrist. I dont even really wear a watch normally, havent since high school honestly, but there was something about watching a total stranger's spreadsheet number climb by the thousands every time I refreshed the page that got me. Its still going. I have no idea where it lands by the time the campaign closes but it already feels like one of those things people are going to point back at.
What gets me about all three of these stories, Apple, Nokia, Pebble, is that theyre really the same story told at wildly different scales. Its all just: does the thing you made match what people actually wanted, and did you time it right. Apple timed the iPhone 4S launch into a quarter that didnt even have a new phone in it and still crushed it because the demand was already sitting there. Nokia built a genuinely decent phone and launched it into a market that had already made up its mind about what a smartphone looks like. And then two guys with a Kickstarter page tapped into something that didnt exist as a mainstream product category yet at all and got ten times their goal before lunch, relatively speaking.
I dont have a grand theory tying this together, I just think its a weirdly good week to be paying attention if you like watching how fast money and attention move around this industry. Three totally different companies, three totally different sizes, and the gap between "record quarter" and "$1.8 billion loss" is apparently about six days of press releases.
Also, separately, Docusign got baked into Adobe Reader this week so you can sign PDFs without printing them out like a barbarian, which is a small thing but its going to save me an actual embarrassing amount of time. Ill take the small wins along with the billion-dollar ones.