At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
Listening to the morning radio on ABC 774 in Melbourne a couple of days ago, I heard a conversation between host John Faine and Jonathon Green, editor of The Drum. Green was opining that there was a significant mis-match between the kinds of people that might purchase an iPad and those people after whom the various print media organisations were chasing in the hope of selling newspaper or magazine subscriptions.
In essence, it was argued that young people buy iPads and scour a huge variety of sources for their news while old people are likely news subscribers, but generally unlikely to buy an iPad.
A caller to the show (claiming to be 23) confirmed the general sentiments.
Interestingly, Green also revealed (from an unnamed insider) that the Australian newspaper had sold something over 4,000 subscriptions at $5 per month for iPad access to their news. Hardly the stuff upon which fortunes are made!
Conversations and information such as this make it very clear that the purchasers of the iPad are highly unlikely to be the hoped-for saviours of the print media.
Further evidence of this came to light in a recent graph which was published to demonstrate that the iPad was rapidly gaining a significant share of the browser market; rising steadily from a near-zero share in early April to around 0.1% share by the end of May (the iPhone is currently around 0.6% market-share).
However, it is a closer inspection of the data which makes for a fascinating insight (please, open the link and take a good close look at the graph).
Use of the iPad on Saturdays and Sundays is nearly double that of week-days. It's very clearly a recreational device which is in most use when the owner has recreational time.
Interestingly, the day upon which the iPad was first available in Australia is clearly visible - Friday 28th May is the first Friday which came close to the usage levels of the weekend data. This of course would be the Saturday in Australia (showing as Friday on US-based data) demonstrating that the new owners spent the weekend coming to grips with their new toy.
And for those people interested in taking over the Internet, it would appear that selling 2 million iPads gets you a little over 0.1% browser share.
Michelle Thomas
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