Android Beats Apple: Part 1, Android, the underdog? Upsets iPhone in Q2 Deathmatch

Ben

The news reports over the last few days that Android handsets outsold iPhone in Q2 are misleading hyperbolic and dare I say possibly irrelevant.

Except for this...  No one gets to win.

No one gets to win.  I know, it make for terrible headlines but Apple and Google have already won seats at the table.  The players yet to be introduced are HP, and Microsoft, and the legacy players that could resurrect themselves Blackberry and Nokia.  The goal is different for each of them but what they seek most from the vast mobile market is not so much dominance as relevance.

It is in this context that Q2 sales reports are a big win for Google Android.

Google decided long ago that they needed to have a presence in the mobile space Must read Google Blog entry from Sept 2008 about the future of Mobile

The only reason Google bought developed and released Android for free was to insure a future with Google ads in it.  It was entirely possible that the mobile phone market might have developed without an effective way for Google to sell ads.  (perish the thought) My original view was that Google had modest ambitions and wanted to control the mobile space enough to insure that they would have a seat at the table.  That was before iAds (and the dark times...)  I was way under shooting the mark of how fractured the market would become and as a result how important it would be that Android be very successful in its own right.  What the recent news articles confirm is that the incredible sales growth, speed of development and diversity of options of the Android Platform virtually guarantee Google will be selling ads to millions that are served to billions of users using mobile platforms in the future.

As Nokia Will tell you (111million device sales at an average price of 61 EUR and a net profit of about 90 cents a unit... ouch!).  Unit sales do not translate into profits.  Google has a working model in search but the metaphor for how we relate to our date could change drastically over the next few years (hello FlipBook).  and their goal will be to make sure that the investments they have made in Maps, Nav, Docs, Mail, and operating systems will insure they have plenty of fertile advertising ground.  (they will)

Author is Long Apple and wishes he was smart enough to buy Google when it came out at $90.

iPhone IS the mobile internet

Engadget who has gone out of their way to mention they had no intentions of writing any proprietary access programs for mobile devices today announced an iPhone specific Application/browser as a result of research that showed that more than 95%! of all mobile traffic to their site is iPhones (iTouch count too).   LINK

Interweb smack down

Given the current crop of mobile computing devices and even some of the ones in near term development.  who will make the product people are more or even AS likely to use on the interWebs as the iPhone? The top Win Mobile phone is the HTC Touch Cruise and by my feeble math the TOTAL use share on Engadgets web site of all Win Mobile phones represent only 1%.  Maybe Microsoft is emulating Apple by being the “The super-small market-share guy”

Network Externalities are the path to dominance in a format war (see evil empire vs. Apple mid 80s to …) and Apple is out to a huge early lead in the mobile computing marketplace, Blackberry notwithstanding.  Businesses and individuals will find the choice to use an iPhone easier as time goes on because it will do more than other phones just because it already does it.  There is no Technical reason Engadget could not build software optimized for another device but they won’t.  They won’t because there will be no reason to and the people buying a mobile computing device that want access to Engadget ( or any of the other gazillion iPhone accelerated web sites) will find that iPhone is the only one that gives them what they want.

Apple will dominate the mobile computing space, the questions are by how much and who will be the alternatives.  The only current promising player seems to be Android but not for a while.  WinMobile is DOA so Microsoft could (not really) give up and start over with a real competing product but that would be years away.  Blackberry is a wildcard clearly a great device but the lack of a real computing/browsing environment mean it cannot win longer term (unless they do he said humbly).

The competition has a little time the market will move slowly to iPhone but there could be 50 million on the street by the end of next year.  Remember Jobs pointed out that 1% of the 1 billion unit per year market by the end of 2008.  10% world wide or 100 million a year will not happen overnight but the forces that could lead to that conclusion are undeniable and very powerful.