It doesn't surprise me that Microsoft is in this space, and that they're doing well. But who would have thought this was a billion dollar business? I figured that the conference room's tech begins to rapidly depreciate almost immediately after installation; but maybe this is something different.
Playing accountant here you might depreciate the thing over 4 years so $2000 cost per year. Against that the occupants of the conference room are likely costing > $1m a year in wage costs so you don't need a huge boost in productivity to make it worth it.
To put it in perspective, a single Cisco Telepresence device (you typically will need at least two) runs ~30k list (you'll be paying, eh, maybe ~70% depending on your relationship with your distributor). A whole 3200 system will run around ~300k (again, list). A device @ 10k is absolute peanuts. Take eight engineers, a few managers and a C-level and put them into a conference room with your organization's Boulder, CO branch's counterparts and 90 minutes of their time in salary is going to run about the same.
Microsoft is playing at the integration game. The Surface Hub is a knock-out, they gave it a decent whirl at the Surface Pro 4 (honestly, it's the best far note-taking device on the market IMO simply because the PixelSense display[1] is so stylus friendly - writing on it is nearly like writing on paper), and their very very crummy phone apparently is going to run native Win10 binaries on the new 4-core ARMs so they can leverage all those previous apps and throw them into the ecosystem.
The ARM announcement is targeting what they are calling "cellular laptops" that use 64bit ARM chips in a clam shell form factor. They didn't really announce anything around the phone, but its pretty obvious that something like that will be coming pretty soon.
I really wanted to like the Nokia 1520. The screen was fantastic. Man, it drove me crazy though.
Breaking the number down a bit more, that's < $10/working day.
If you have four people per meeting being paid minimum wage in the UK (~$10), you only need to save about 15 minutes a day for a basic hourly cost to even out.
I'm pretty sure I lose a few minutes a day waiting for a single meeting room to be setup properly, as the speaker has been taken one day, it's logged out, someone forgets a cable, etc. And I'm just one meeting in those rooms.
Not that I disagree that iPhones are big, but cmon, "the biggest business on earth?" This is a planet that has Oil business, Telecom business, medical products, rice, coffee, fish, illicit drugs, pharmaceutical drugs. There are other businesses that are in a class well beyond a mere consumer electronic device, iPhone or no.
Google has a massive search business that composes the majority of its profits, apple has huge enterprise contracts for stuff like apple TV and the like that have nothing to do with their iphones, Microsoft has the obscenely large business side of the operation that has little to do with the Surface.
I've never heard this before-- and in fact most people seem to say the opposite.
Just looked on eBay and according to recent sold listings, as of the past few days a 5 could easily bring $100-150 depending on configuration. That's a 4+ year old phone.
If it was $500-600 new, it has lost ~80% of its value in 4 years. I think you can safely call that rapid depreciation. Maybe less rapid compared to other phones.
Well, duh. I wasn't comparing the iPhone to an actual investment. The Galaxy S3 (released at roughly same time) is now selling for ~$50 on eBay (sometimes a bit higher).
Going from $500 - $700 to $100 is a pretty big depreciation in my book. I guess it is better than going to $0 if that is what you are comparing it to. However, if you compare it to a durable good I do not imagine it compares well. (Example durable good: well built wood furniture)
