Digitimes reports:
only a handful of companies may get into WP7 when it arrives, they added. HTC may end up controlling 70 to 80 percent of the market simply by being one of the initial partners
via Taiwan phone makers balking at Windows Phone 7? | Electronista.
Confirming my assumption that “Android is clearly the darling of “Others” who are being shunned by Microsoft”.
Social games on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices are competing for television viewers. In fact, these apps, tracked on the Flurry network alone, comprise of a daily audience of more than 19 million who spend over 22 minutes per day using these apps. Treated as a consumer audience, its size and reach rank somewhere between NBC’s Sunday Night Football and ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, and only 4 million viewers shy from beating the number one prime-time show on television, FOX’s American Idol.
via Flurry. Continue reading “Apps attract more viewer attention than most TV shows”
Windows Phone had its day in the sun yesterday. After discarding its previous seven-year effort with Windows Mobile, Microsoft started with a clean sheet of paper. However, whereas the software has been re-built, the business model has not. WP is still a licensed operating system whose primary customers are mobile phone vendors. With Symbian mostly out of the picture, WP becomes only the second viable commercially licensed mobile OS, after Android.
So with two licensed platforms in the running, how do we measure success in the licensing business? Units sold to end users is one metric. But that data will have to include the performance of vendors and operators and other distributors. And it will take a year to do valid comparisons. The only indicative metric we have available today is how many devices have been committed by vendors.
As WP is out of the gate with device announcements, we can actually measure this. We can plot each vendor’s commitment to various platforms as an early indicator of strategic success. To that end, here’s the methodology: I took all smartphone vendors and tallied how many SKUs they have announced or leaked for either the WP or Android platforms (source: pdadb.net). I then plotted each vendor on two “commitment axes” (see notes below). Continue reading “Escape from license-land: Measuring phone vendor commitment to licensed mobile platforms”
In an interview with PCMag, Rubin said,
“Look, the world doesn’t need another platform. Android is free and open; I think the only reason you create another platform is for political reasons. Why doesn’t the whole world run with [Android]? They don’t like the people who developed, or “not invented here [NIH]”
I note some irony Continue reading “What did Andy Rubin mean by saying WP7 was created for political reasons?”
Acer chairman J.T. Wang recently predicted that Apple’s share of the tablet market would decline precipitously as new rivals emerge, falling from nearly 100 percent to 20 to 30 percent.
So let me get this straight: A PC vendor…
What value have the carriers brought? Seriously. What software on Android phones have the carriers added that’s any good at all?
Things you don’t hear iPhone users say: “Man, this iPhone would be even better if my carrier could ‘add value’ to it.”
via Daring Fireball Linked List: Andy Rubin Talks Android.
Good questions. I would seriously like to hear any answers to these questions as I have never used any of these operator software phones.
Now that NYT and WSJ were both tipped off about the coming of a CDMA iPhone, I think it’s a safe bet. Is this significant? What is the CDMA addressable market?
Here is a chart showing for the “CDMA 3G” subscribers (source: CDMA Development Group.) Continue reading “Adding CDMA increases iPhone addressable market by 16 percent”
Before proclaiming the death of a company or product it’s important to understand what makes it live. I’ll illustrate with a personal experience.
I was once asked to comment on a product designed to be a “Blackberry killer”. Much like the latest Droid Pro, the product looked like a Blackberry. It had a monoblock keyboard and a nearly square screen. It was, in other words, a product designed for thumb typing emails.
The backstory is that, like many phones, the requirements came from operators. At the time, Continue reading “The imminent demise of killers”
Adobe is one of the last surviving desktop software companies. So is Microsoft. Consolidation happens when an industry matures and excess capacity and excess overhead can be squeezed out of the value chain, giving a temporary burst of earnings growth.
So, in this way of thinking, recognizing that the sun is setting on desktop software, a merger of old schools of thought may make sense. Rather like Sun and Oracle or HP and Compaq.
But then a lot of other things make more sense. Like both companies trying to expand into new growth areas. Like Microsoft talking to RIM or Adobe developing tools for HTML5. Adobe’s cash cow products are not going anywhere without a deep reset. Same is true for Microsoft. They will both face these challenges whether standing alone or together.
There would be nothing strange about a Microsoft Adobe merger, but there would be nothing great about it either.
How do you think about the iPhone 3GS after the iPhone 4 is out? I have a hypothesis that it’s not what it seems.
The standard logic is that the 3GS (which I will call the n-1 where n is the current phone version) is a lower-priced leftover that covers a lower price point and expands the market.
I think it’s designed to give the illusion that the iPhone 4 is actually more desirable steering more potential buyers to the new (nth) phone.
To illustrate I’m going to call upon the wonderful example given by behavioral economist Dan Ariely at the TED talks. Continue reading “The cognitive illusion that is iPhone n-1”
