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.
