DISASTER! SELL YOUR APPLE STOCK! Why? Because, according to Bloomberg and a billion other websites, Apple’s share of the tablet market has plummeted. During the three months to December 2010, Apple’s iPad grabbed ‘only’ 75 percent of shipments, down massively from the 95 percent it had in the previous quarter. Extrapolating wildly, analysts therefore predict Apple will within two years have a market share of minus 45 percent. ARGH!

Or, maybe—just maybe—what really happened is that Apple’s iPad had pretty much the entire market to itself at one point, and so got all the sales. And now there’s competition, Apple’s got less of the market. Of course, it’s a growing market, so Apple has a smaller slice of a much larger pie each quarter; also, it’s likely Apple’s profiting hand-over-fist and other companies aren’t, but SELL SELL SELL APPLE DOOMED OH MY GOD ANDROID FTW!

Oh, and  Neil Mawston, director at Strategy Analytics:

Even at $500 retail, based on some of the research we’ve done, that’s probably two or three times more than what most mass market consumers are expecting to pay.

Really? Well, I hope “most mass market consumers” will be happy with their $170 tablets that, clearly, won’t be total heaps of shit. (I know technology tends to drop in price over time, but $170 for a tablet? Really?)

A nice piece from MacRumors, which digs up a 1985 interview with Steve Jobs, including this gem of a quote:

My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to happen next year that’s going to change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow away—you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.

This is a problem with many industries, not least the majority of the tech world. Most companies provide customers with what they say they want; good companies provided customers with what they actually need, even when they didn’t realise they needed it.

Paul Thurrott:

There are some parallels to draw between […] Cook’s taking over day-to-day operations at Apple […] and Steve Ballmer’s ascension at Microsoft. And not to ruin the surprise, but this may be bad news for Apple. The simplest way to explain this is to simply provide the closing quote in the [NY Times] article: “He will not be the visionary, but that’s O.K. because there are other talented people around him.” Sure. That’s what they said about Ballmer too. Just a thought.

John Gruber:

There are some parallels: an operations executive succeeding a visionary product-oriented founder. But, I’d say Cook-as-Ballmer is pretty much the worst case scenario for Apple.

The warnings signs with Ballmer have been there for years. He’s been out of touch for a long time. Remember when he laughed at the iPhone? Said it had “no chance”? Let’s not worry about Tim Cook until he starts saying dumb things.

In addition to that, I’m pretty sure Tim Cook’s never leapt about the stage like a mental person. He also led Apple through the previous period where Jobs was away from the action, and hasn’t put a foot wrong when he’s been under the spotlight at Apple events or on earnings calls.

Even in the most recent earnings call, Cook differentiated himself from Ballmer in dismissing the opposition. Ballmer got caught by claiming Apple’s product had no chance, yet it went on to be a massive success. Cook’s dismissal of Android tablets is based on facts rather than guesswork. On Honeycomb tablets (i.e. the first Android tablets with an OS actually designed for tablets rather than smartphones), he states:

There’s nothing shipping yet, so I don’t know. They lack performance specs, they lack prices, they lack timing. Today, they’re vapour. We’ll assess them as they come out. However, we’re not sitting still…

There’s a big difference there from “no chance”.

Trying to annoy the music industry for the billionth time, The Pirate Bay says its next major launch will be fear.themusicbay.org, according to TechRadar. An unnamed insider is quoted as follows:

The music industry can’t even imagine what we’re planning to roll out in the coming months.

For years they’ve complained bitterly about piracy, but if they ever had a reason to be scared it is now.

Roughly translated: LOOK AT THE SIZE OF OUR HUGE PENIS!

Yeah, well done, The Pirate Bay. You celebrate ‘sticking it to the man’, including the artists (who clearly don’t deserve anything for their work) and those evil indie labels (who burn millions per second with their unicorn-powered cocaine factories).

The majors need a slap, certainly, but the battle’s largely been won in music: DRM-free track-by-track sales across many sites, direct-selling from indies, and the likes of Spotify for on-demand access to as much music as you can consume. I’m not sure how the Pirate Bay’s antics will improve things; instead, they’re more likely to enforce to many the feeling that they should, for some reason, be entitled to free music and that everyone they rip off somehow had it coming.

UPDATE: Confusion online about this aspect of the iPlayer rebrand. Some sources now claiming iPlayer will include “selected” archived radio/music content. More when the picture becomes clearer, so to speak.

UPDATE 2: James Cridland explains that the BBC plans involve making radio content more ‘interactive’ (whatever that means), along with moving radio content from iPlayer to a “new stand-alone product”. So it’s not the death of online radio, merely the fragmentation of the BBC’s online archival offering, which during a period of consolidation still doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

New Media Age reports that the BBC’s iPlayer is to lose radio content. The article adds:

It will, however, continue to work with third parties to integrate further social functions into the iPlayer.

So you’ll be able to tweet some bollocks about whatever crap you’re watching on BBC3, but won’t be able to access any of the BBC’s radio and digital radio output on iPlayer. THAT MAKES SENSE.

Gosh, Rupert Murdoch, David Cameron and co. must be lathering themselves into a frenzy almost 24/7 on this news.

This is the first time there has been a single, unified strategy across the entire BBC Online proposition

said Erik Huggers, outgoing director of Future Media & Technology.

Just as well, given that the arseholes in government last time and this time have a single, unified strategy to fuck the BBC repeatedly up the arse, while Rupert Murdoch cheers from the sidelines and Middle England erupts into a party at the increasing likelihood within a decade of no longer having to pay £12 per month for the BBC, despite firing tons more than that at Sky for a few decent shows but an awful lot of utter shit

he didn’t go on to say.