Author: Horace Dediu

Motorola—like HTC—is thus a bellwether for makers of Android phones, whose sales have now caught up with those of the iPhone—about 300,000 a day worldwide. Some industry analysts doubt that it will be able to create a big market for its devices and make enough profits before cheaper providers move in. If they are right, the smartphone market may eventually become like that for personal computers: a handful of huge competitors with tiny margins. The difference will be that these firms will hail from around the world rather than being mainly American.

via Motorola: Breaking up | The Economist.

When I argued that the meek shall inherit Android, the profitability data was the core evidence. That argument, made in August, was:

So here we have the real challenge to Android:  partnership with defeated incumbents whose ability to build profitable and differentiated products is hamstrung by the licensing model and whose incentives to move up the steep trajectory of necessary improvements are limited.

In other words, Android’s licensees won’t have the profits or the motivation to spend on R&D so as to make exceptionally competitive products at a time when being competitive is what matters most.

The surge in emerging market Android entrants has been the latest setback for branded Android vendors. What should be the long term strategy for companies like Motorola and Samsung? Continue reading “Resetting Motorola”

There is an assumption floating around the debates in this and other forums that the “battle” between mobile platforms is a land grab. The unspoken implication of this assumption is that once a user is captured she is permanently locked into the chosen platform never to move to another again as long as she lives.

For example @dutchtender remarked:

many people’s first smart phone will be android. android can take them “cradle to grave.” android will be there with a higher end solutions when they can afford it

This is a strong but untested claim. It may be true but we owe it a bit of thought.

Continue reading “How sticky is Android?”

Since I spend most of my time thinking about what will happen, at the end of each year, rather than looking forward I like to look back to see how wrong I’ve been. The great thing about being wrong is that you learn something. Especially if you use a foundational theory to tie concepts together. Theory building is all about finding anomalies that adjust and improve it.

Fortunately, exactly one year ago, on December 30 2009 I wrote an article asking if Android was disruptive. It turned out to be the right question to ask for 2010.

What have I learned since? Continue reading “The PC clones of the post-PC era”

When reading the comments disputing the possible end of the voice-phone era I’m reminded of similar comments disputing the end of the PDA era.

Although the Apple Newton pioneered the market in 1992 and John Sculley came up with the acronym, the Newton did not sell in significant volumes. It wasn’t until 1997 with the Palm Pilot that the PDA market took off. Microsoft quickly followed with a licensed OS based on Windows CE. In 2001 Microsoft launched the Pocket PC brand to cement its attack on the PDA market. The first phones using a Microsoft OS were using something called Pocket PC Phone Edition. The first Nokia smartphones (Communicators) were built like mobile PDAs.

The logic was quite compelling. The original PDA was built to mobilize contacts, calendars and notes. They replaced bulky paper organizers and seamlessly synced to PC productivity software like Outlook. It was a compelling product in the US where small business customers needed to keep track of hundreds of contacts. Users could even ‘beam’ contacts to each other via infrared. The idea of adding a phone function to the device made sense insofar as contacts could be immediately dialed from the contact app rather than typed into another device’s phone keypad.

By the early 2000’s PDAs were forecast to sell by the hundreds of millions. Continue reading “The parable of the the PDA: predicting the smartphone's future”