Android Won. Windows Lost

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/12/android-won-windows-lost-now-what-the-battle-of-the-century-is-decided-microsoft-relegated-to-ever-s.html

by cramforce • 14 years ago

96 113 14 years ago

communities-dominate.blogs.com

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I wonder if this guy did the Googlezon video (that is the one where Google and Amazon merge and become a planet dominating company) people would start work at Google and then post it to the company wide 'misc' mailing list. It was almost like clockwork.

I think Android has had an impressive run. There is an interesting article about how it dominates Chinese smartphones but Google isn't getting any return on that investment (80% of Android phones in China ship with Baidu as the search provider). That is something that didn't happen with Windows.

w1ntermute7• 14 years ago

> That is something that didn't happen with Windows.

Baidu dominates on the desktop in China as well. China is a unique situation, since the government actively encourages domestic copycats of foreign companies while preventing/making it difficult for those foreign companies trying to enter the Chinese market.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

Yes, it dominates the desktop, but Microsoft doesn't depend on search revenue quite like Google does.

JoshTriplett3• 14 years ago

Google doesn't just make money on Android via search; they have a pile of other services integrated with Android, and they also make money from app sales and ad-infested apps.

tadfisher2• 14 years ago

Can ads not be used responsibly? Must apps with embedded ads be referred to as "infested"?

e12e2• 14 years ago

> here is an interesting article about how it dominates Chinese smartphones but Google isn't getting any return on that investment (80% of Android phones in China ship with Baidu as the search provider).

They still maintain Google as the app-store though? So Google gets ~30% of every app/media-item sold?

Permit• 14 years ago

Doesn't Google's App Store tend towards free apps moreso than others? I don't have an Android phone but I remember that was the case previously. Angry Birds was a paid app on both Apple's and Microsoft's store, but free on Android for some reason.

gbog• 14 years ago

no, most androids don't even have Google app store in China. When we ship our apps we have a bot pushing to over 20 android markets.

untog2• 14 years ago

I'm not sure that they do. AFAIK, they take open-source Android (that is, with no Google apps) and build on it.

Executor• 14 years ago

The idea of doing ALL payments and transactions by mobile is a horrible future. It is the lack of privacy that cash gives us, and the complete dependence on mobile phones, corporations, and banks. What about people that don't want to have smart phones and refuse to pay via paperless? We have the ability to choose what technology to use - let's not get rid of cash shall we?

w1ntermute7• 14 years ago

Who says we have to lose our privacy because we use digital payments? Just take a look at Bitcoin.

politician3• 14 years ago

Bitcoin provides a number of great features, but anonymity is not one of them.

cageface7• 14 years ago

I agree it's somewhat frightening but also inevitable. We geeks should do what we can to make the future as human-friendly as possible.

mtgx2• 14 years ago

Bitcoin is a good alternative to cash in the future, for privacy purposes.

medell• 14 years ago

If this future comes true, maybe the situation will reverse and there will be a 2.5% cash handling fee instead of the fee some companies currently charge for credit card transactions :)

bicknergseng• 14 years ago

"Today latest Q3 data and 20 months after Nokia CEO annoucned the premature death of Symbian, in Q3 Symbian sales has collapsed from the 29% market share it had when Elop announced it, to 2% now."

So tired of this total misuse of a statistic. Yes, Symbian had ~29% of the market when they switch to backing WP7. However, that's leaving out the fact that 29% is down from 47% in 2009, and that the rate at which people were abandoning Symbian for Android continued to increase. Furthermore, that market share was almost entirely cheap dumbphones. The reality is that Symbian was never a popular smartphone platform and was not ready for a global shift from dumbphones to smartphones, and that Apple and Android disrupted that market and split it among themselves. That whole section was littered with ranty inaccuracies. OP goes on to talk about "Windows Phone 6" as a confused combination of WinMo 6.5 and WP7.

sounds2• 14 years ago

Nokia had the N900. They had MeeGo (back before it was a joke). They had a good shot at being part of the smartphone market.

What other "ranty innacuracies" would you like to point out?

Windows Phone 6 was a (mild) typo for Windows Mobile 6. (Not WP7)

bcoates• 14 years ago

By the time the N900 came out Nokia had already lost to iPhones and Androids. It's predecessor devices were neat but they weren't phones, the N800 was a weird little pocket-sized tablet. Usability of the whole series was underwhelming.

arocks• 14 years ago

I belong to one of the non-US markets where Nokia smartphones and dumbphones had a majority share. To be honest, abandoning Symbian was quite a shock here because, despite being slow, it was a very familiar user interface for vast majority of the population.

Rather than throw the baby with the bathwater, Nokia could retained a very loyal customer base by offering a smoother migration path. They could have even made an entirely rewritten touch based OS with a familiar Nokia UI (or as a fallback mode). It would have been a killer product in such markets. Instead Elop chose to write-off all the good work Nokia has done thus far by calling it a "burning platform".

Whichever numbers you look at today, the sheer stupidity of that decision is painfully evident.

politician3• 14 years ago

Maybe Microsoft will buy T-Mobile and let Skype loose on it.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

Never seen anyone use an android workstation as their main work system though. I have an android phone and a PC. I spend ~8-10 hours on the PC and probably < 1 hour on the phone.

Not saying it won't happen , but it seems a little premature to call "victory" just yet.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

> Never seen anyone use an android workstation as their main work system though

Me neither, but if the hardware specs are right, it's a breeze to install a full Ubuntu userland and work from there. I don't think anyone will ever want to run a heavy IDE (such as Eclipse or Visual Studio) on any machine that was designed to be power efficient rather than fast, but I have no problem developing for Django, Flask or App Engine on my aging Atom (N270, IIRC) netbook. And, if I develop on a remote host (as I do, when I need serious computing power), all I need is bandwidth, a decent screen (all my phones have HDMI outputs), a keyboard and, maybe, a pointing device (easy, since all of my Android devices have Bluetooth).

The more people read their e-mail and manage their shared work documents through a browser, the less they need a desktop PC. Soon enough, the desktop PC will follow the path of the Unix workstation and be relegated to a niche where being able to locally process locally stored data is important. If I were Steve Ballmer, I'd retire right now and never, ever, worry about Microsoft again.

clarky076• 14 years ago

It turns out its easier to "sell" lots of copies of something for free. Microsoft actually sold those > 1 billion copies of windows. Google still makes almost nothing on android. This article was absurdly over the top IMO.

rogerbinns3• 14 years ago

Microsoft makes money on the one off sale and then essentially zero from then on. Google makes zero on the sale, but then makes money from then on. Asymco has the numbers from 6 months ago:

http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/14/the-android-income-statemen...

Also note that the more recent the version of Android, the higher they monetize:

http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2012/10/24/androids-jelly-be...

e12e2• 14 years ago

Which may be why windows 8 bundles an appstore and infrastructure for ads.

clarky076• 14 years ago

You refute my statement that they make almost nothing with an ARPU of $1.63 and a 500 mil profit? seriously? Microsoft made over 20 billion net profit in 2011 and Apple has an ARPU around $600.

moistgorilla• 14 years ago

Google makes money anytime somebody browses the internet from their phone or buys an app from google play.

clarky076• 14 years ago

I said "almost" nothing. about 500 mil last year. Compared to the 40 bil or so apple is making that is almost nothing. Microsoft made over 20 bil last year so I'll stand by the almost nothing.

w1ntermute7• 14 years ago

> Microsoft actually sold those > 1 billion copies of windows.

No, it didn't. A very large portion of those 1 billion copies were pirated.

bjg• 14 years ago

Sources for either side?

clarky076• 14 years ago

Well, since the install base from the article was > 1.5 billion, and you yourself cited a 1/3 pirate rate, that makes > 1 billion sold....

mtgx2• 14 years ago

What do you mean? Devices that run Android are not free.

Karunamon• 14 years ago

That depends entirely on the carrier.

jeremyjh• 14 years ago

And they also are not sold by Google.

clarky076• 14 years ago

Android is free. the devices aren't. Google gives Android away and the OEM's sell it. Samsung makes lots of money selling Android phones. Google makes almost nothing.

fumar3• 14 years ago

This vision of the world feels like it was dreamed up by a science fiction author. I understand Android is growing. But, I can not help but think he is answering the wrong question. Honestly, I do not know what the right question is. It reads like a narrow view of the market, global economy, and fads. I look at my very young cousins. They are growing up with iPads and iPhones not Google products. (observations)

kumarm• 14 years ago

Apple losing market share significantly in both India and China where pretty much Android has closer 90% marketshare.

vvhn• 14 years ago

In India at least, Apple/iOS never had anything resembling meaningful marketshare. Android has replaced Symbian and whatever's left of blackberry as the ubiquitous platform powering phones from INR 5000 ($95 ) to INR 35000 ($625) not "taken away marketshare from Apple" since they didn't have any begin with.

fumar3• 14 years ago

Good Point, by shear population, they dictate a lot. I will think about this some more. One global company becoming a leader, by a large margin, is something I dislike. Too much power in the hands of one piece of software.

drivebyacct24• 14 years ago

Why do people point out these anecdotes as if they refute real numbers and trends?

India and China aren't the only places where Apple is losing (relative) mobile marketshare.

dannyr5• 14 years ago

Actually you are the one with the narrow view of the market. Look beyond your young cousins.

The rest of the world are using Android devices not Apple.

Android phones has 80+% market share in a number of countries in Europe. Worldwide, Android tablets are slowly gaining market share from the IPad.

In Africa, Android phones cost less than $100. In a few years, it might be under $50. A lot of poor people will not be able to afford a PC but a cheap phone is probably the only computer they'll ever have.

Encosia7• 14 years ago

It's important to keep in mind that Android is completely subsidized by advertising revenue. Making money on mobile advertising is still troublesome enough in any market, but selling advertising targeted toward "a lot of poor people not able to afford a PC" is even less profitable. As someone who develops for the web and mobile web, I'm glad to see good browsers in the hands of more users, but it's important to keep in mind what makes that possible in the first place. If Android dominates in markets where no one can afford paid apps and no advertisers spend significant money, while Apple continues to hold a lock on the more lucrative demographics, Android could actually be in trouble overall.

fumar3• 14 years ago

Good point. My comment was reactionary and not very well thought out. I was recently, in Mexico, and noticed a much higher use of Android versus iOS products. There are significantly cheaper alternatives to the iPhone.

zmmmmm3• 14 years ago

> I look at my very young cousins. They are growing up with iPads and iPhones not Google products. (observations)

This is true, but I think you are looking too short term. Here in every Christmas catalogue there are 3 pages of iPads and iPad accessories. But you know what is on the front page of most of the catalogues? a $99 Android tablet. The tablet probably sucks, but I think this is the turning point. Parents are not going to spend $300+ on tablets for their kids when the "same thing" is next to it for $99. These are going to flood into living rooms, then schools, and all other instutions. The iPad has a temporary monopoly in these places now but it's not going to last. In a year's time the components in the $99 tablets will be good enough that the experience will actually be good and then it's all over. Apple's fatal flaw is that their business model depends on those high margin. The often quoted statistic that Apple makes nearly all the profits in the mobile industry is as much a weakness as a strength. Apple needs those margins, their business model depends on it. They can't survive in a low-margin world but they also can't prevent it. They have to retreat and hide every time in the luxury / premium segment of the market where their business model works, but the vast majority of us do not dwell. To survive in the mass market, Apple needs to create revolutionary hit after revolutionary hit - and they've done amazingly well at that so far, but you have to ask how many times they can pull it off. Eventually they are going to falter and then their whole model crumbles.

cageface7• 14 years ago

Exactly. Apple's vertical integration gave them a big first mover advantage in this market but their obsession with control is going to kill them as the hardware is commoditized.

Bezos is 100% right about this - content is king in mobile in the long run.

untog2• 14 years ago

I think Apple is relatively content to not dominate the mass market, though. Look at their computers- they are a premium price, but they still make a lot of profit on them.

cageface7• 14 years ago

The Platform of the Century will power cameras, credit cards, cellphones, computers, consoles, clocks

This is why I've decided to crosstrain from iOS to Android. I think Apple is going to continue to do well for many years but Android is going to be much bigger than just phones.

I expect solid Android experience to be very much in demand.

Dove2• 14 years ago

I do Android freelancing, and I'm starting to see requests for apps that look more like traditional embedded software than smartphone apps. Controllers for industrial equipment, personal medical devices, props in simulations. Real Technology stuff.

That's not exactly new, but my perception is that it's picked up a lot in the last few months. And I think it's just the tip of the iceberg. For anything you can imagine wanting to control with a touchscreen, putting a cheap Android display in a case and connecting up over USB or Bluetooth seems to be making a lot of sense to people.

I fully expect Android skills to be profoundly in demand in a year or two. Study up now; it's not really a quick system to master.

cageface7• 14 years ago

Exactly. I've got a couple of apps about to hit the app store so I'm gradually making my way up the curve. I agree it's not the easiest API to learn. The basics are actually pretty straightforward but the details you have to consider once you start doing real apps can be tricky.

I'm really hoping Kotlin takes off as an alternative Android development language though. Java's OK but a more modern and flexible language would certainly help.

Do you have any good pointers or references for Android dev in these kinds of environments?

elteto• 14 years ago

You've hit the nail in the head regarding Android spilling over beyond just phones. Take a look at the ARM development boards, there is a new one coming out almost every week, and guess what almost all of them have in common? They all run some flavor of Android.

Let's say you are developing some expensive piece of industrial technology and would like to provide some sort of interface through a tablet. Sure there is the iPad and many opt to use that, but in the end is a closed garden, you can't change it significantly. Where are you going to go? Android of course, since it already has almost everything you need and it is customizable to your heart's desire. In the long run, iOS will keep on being one of the champions of the mobile market (and that is exactly where Apple wants it to be) but Android will evolve beyond that reaching many other sectors.

gurkendoktor2• 14 years ago

I don't get it, and I found it very hard to read meaning into all the superlatives.

Haven't there been more Linux devices than Windows devices for a long time now? For every PC that maps 1:1 to the owner's digital life, there are probably three toasters and a smart fridge running Linux. In the future, they will run Android. How does that help Google or hurt Microsoft? Apple could probably switch all their non-iOS iPods to run a modified Android and not a single thing would change.

So far, Android has only "won" the smartphone game by numbers. And in the process, Samsung has become an internal monopoly. I'm not convinced that this is the solid foundation on which mankind's digital future will be built.

pacala• 14 years ago

The Linux devices out there were all lacking a good GUI layer. From the perspective of a consumer they were primitive, ugly and barely functional.

gurkendoktor2• 14 years ago

But will Android clothes have an awesome UI layer? Not to downplay Android's success, I find it very hard to follow the jump from smartphones to everything else. I don't see Android scaling up (to run on computers like Windows 8). And when it scales down, Google doesn't win anything.

The OP reminds me of business analysts in the last years. Some metric in the PRC increases XX% year over year, and a short back-of-the-envelope calculation later, Westerners shouldn't teach their kids anything but Mandarin anymore. And Android is not even as autonomous as the PRC. Suppose it runs on 99% of all devices (whatever that means at the time) - I can easily imagine a court forcibly separating Google's services from the OS.

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

Too much hyperbole. Things change quickly these days, and I hope we don't see java "embedded within humans" anytime in the future.

tnuc• 14 years ago

There is a pacemaker that uses java.

huggah• 14 years ago

Too much hyperbole, but I was struck by this, which I hadn't considered before:

"We often go to Amazon just to search something - to see what else Amazon recommends. We are quite literally accessing Amazon 'just to see ads'."

I haven't seen a clearer demonstration of the argument that ads, properly targeted and displayed at the right times, provide positive value to the user.

pixl973• 14 years ago

People don't like most advertising because it's lying to them, or at least covering up it's faults (turd rolled in glitter). I mean, what company is going to pay to tell everything about their product. There going to show it in the best light. When people buy something they want to be informed (doesn't a free market require this?). With sites like Amazon or Newegg you get more information about the product and similar products that is supposedly neutral. They don't care 'which' product you buy, as long as you buy it from them. The customer benefits by exposure to more choices, better products, and possibly better pricing.

This does not work as well for vendors, they do not care who you buy from, as long as you buy their product.

B-Con• 14 years ago

The lesson from that is that customers are more likely to trust ads that come from the marketplace, not the sellers. The original point is very good and can be extended a bit: Customers don't hate ads, they hate modern advertising.

Obviously, the marketplace does have some incentive to lie, because they want you to buy something rather than nothing, but they certainly seem less biased. Especially when it comes to relatively fungible goods, they don't care which DVD you buy so long as you buy one, they don't care if product X is way better than Y or about as good as Y, so long as you buy one of them. Unless it's their own product or a very unique product, most goods are relatively fungible from the marketplace's perspective.

Now lets hope the marketplace doesn't secretly sell ad space, disguised as their own "recommendations". It would probably be completely against their best interest to do so, but if a lot of cash were on the line, well, who knows. (They risk their reputation, but if the replacement was plausible, how would they get caught?)

zmmmmm3• 14 years ago

The big problem I have with this kind of analysis is that it's all extrapolation based on existing conditions, with the assumption that nothing disruptive will happen from here on out. You could have done the same analysis at various points in time and concluded that Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry and iOS were all going to dominate the future. The very nature of technology is disruptive and we simply cannot predict what's going to happen next.

Having said that, if this vision does come to fruition, I think it is a wonderful thing for humanity. The fact that the OS that comes to dominate the planet is free, open source and available on (nearly)equal terms to everyone from the most powerful and rich on the planet to the most poor and deprived is a truly amazing and awesome feat. A few years ago I looked at the growth of iOS and truly feared that humanity was headed for a very different future - one where the poor were separated and disenfranchised by their inability to afford access to the dominant mobile platform and the rich were slavishly bound to the constraints of a locked down and tightly controlled ecosystem where all decisions made would be in the interest of the largest company on earth. This latter future did not come to pass, and I am very glad for that (even as I admire and love using Apple products).

ddw• 14 years ago

Yeah, when he gets into Android forecasts for 2014 with one in every four people or whatever - a bit much.

But like you I think its pretty amazing that I can put the same OS on my Raspberry Pi, any crappy tablet, my phone and whatever else at the same rate as the rest of the world for practically nothing.

genuine• 14 years ago

Windows will not have lost until Microsoft goes bankrupt.

Mobile platforms are really just a fad. The future will be essentially a distributed OS, where devices throughout the home interact with a larger system to provide a much more immersive and practical experience. Few will give a fuck about iOS and Android in 10 years

Apple is going to be focusing on novel user input with their new T.V. They've already provided Airplay, etc. but other than music, streaming video, and other information provided by screens and tablets, what are they providing?

Microsoft has a head start with kinect, so if they invested in related research, touch screens, and other novel input devices like the LEAP, they might be able to compete in the future. By placing kinect-like devices around the home with some mics and speakers, you could talk to your computer like in the original Star Trek ("Computer, how hot will it be today?") or make a gesture in the air to turn on and off lights or lock doors. That would be something people would buy.

watmough2• 14 years ago

This is a good point.

I believe, that in the end, the browser will win. The Mozilla OS on phone will go somewhere, and many many apps will move into the browser, both on the low-end phone hardware, and on high-end laptop hardware.

solnyshok• 14 years ago

while android may become the hardware layer king, I think it will be overshadowed by html/js for GUI.

Roybatty• 14 years ago

3 seems to be a magic number. I think eventually Microsoft will have significant share of the mobile/tablet market.

Zigurd• 14 years ago

So far the vast majority of top-level comments on this thread slag the article for hyperbole.

But it is very likely true. Although the installed base of Android systems is small compared to what Windows has piled up over ten years of near total hegemony, Android's market share is growing at a rate that makes Tomi Ahonens's prediction a very good bet indeed.

Remember this prediction, and start acting on it now.

My prediction is that two years from now Hacker News will be full of posts about how nobody predicted how pervasive Android has become.

Android Won. Windows Lost

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