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/Safari Search Revenue

Mozilla receives 

Apparently v.2.2 of the iPhone Firmware includes a google search-bar on the top and right of the address bar just like in a "real" browser.

Revenue is the answer to the question you were going to ask.  Apple cut a deal with Google to put the search bar

 there and will receive income for how much it is used. 

Mozilla received the lions share of its income, $57 Million from Google for the Google branded search bar on it's browser last year.  Apple earns money on the iPhone/Safari browser too.

The back of the envelope...   Mozilla search share implies that 1% of search is worth ~$10 million from Google.  A month ago iPhone represented .3% of the Browser market or ~$3 million dollars worth of search.  It does not sound like much but wait a year.  When there are 50 million of these things on the ground the revenue will be $10s of millions of dollars.

Look, tens of millions of dollars is a lot of money even to a company that earned more than 4 billion dollars in the last year.

Just as an aside when I say iPhone I mean iPhone AND iPod Touch.  Don't be so offended shees.

RIP Windows Mobile

The most interesting thing in the crush of Android news today was not the comparisons to the iPhone or to a lesser extent the blackberry. The biggest news today was the profound ommission of WinMo even in passing as a reasonable alternative to either the iPhone or Android.(GooMo. It is too goody not to use)in any of the thousands of news/blog postings regarding the launch.

Windows Mobile is dead. Long Live GooMo and the iPhone.

Android comes to Play: GooMo and the Future

Ahhh the future.  Three weeks ago we knew there would always be investment banks....

The first "GPhone" is being released today and so is born the first credible competition for the iPhone.  Do not misunderstand, the phone released today could be terrible.  

It is the first credible competition for the iPhone.  Google does not care about the device, they continue to look for ways to expand and protect their search and advertising franchise.

Great Article by Greg Sterling outlines the market and how the iPhone has been really a "proof of concept"  device that will lead to other, more and better devices.  Regardless of what WinMo and Blackberry had done up until the iPhone was introduced, they did not actually get used in a way that makes the internet the internet.

There are a lot of WinMo and Blackberry devices sold and in use, its just that they are not used for anything but texting and email.  (as measured by hits )  [if WinMo is WinMo, should Android be GooMo?]

To Google the internet is advertising and the "Mobile internet" is the future.  Andy Rubin points out in the Google Blog There are more mobile phones in use today by people that have NEVER had a PC (of any kind) than there are currently PC's.  To grow Google must be as ubiquitous in Mobile as they are on our desktops.  It is not important to Google that Android be anything but a minor success, they just need it to be enough of a threat to insure that Google will continue to serve mobile advertising on many devices.

So later today when people are talking about how Great or terrible the actual device is remember that this is the first of what will be MANY from many competitors.  WinMo will eventually be trashed by Microsoft and they will start from scratch and there may be even more players that we have never heard of that will innovate their way into the space.  The point is that in a couple of years there will be better internet enabled phones than we have now available from a number of sources.  

Today is the day that Apple begins to give up some of its 100% market-share in the next generation of mobile platforms. (of which the iPhone is the only current offering).  

We know that there will be insane growth in this market for the next couple of years and that we all will get to benefit from innovations in the devices /methods / cost.  We do not know what those devices would be.   For the Near term iPhone will play "PC" to Googles "Mac"/Android.  It will be fun to watch.