Mobile Computing Industry
Three things stand out from Gartner’s latest smartphones forecast:
The latter two claims are illustrated below:
The US smartphone penetration continues to accelerate.
ComScore has been reporting the estimated absolute number of smartphone users and the last month saw a significant increase of 1.58% in penetration. About 30% of the 234 million US cellphone users (above age of 13) use smartphones. That number was 21% in May of last year.
That means that over 20 million people stopped using voice-only or feature phones in the last 10 months. Equivalent to a rate of 2 million per month.
However, the rate of switching has not been steady. The following chart shows the number of switchers per week. In February it’s been about 900,000 per week and it’s quite possible that in March we’ve seen 1 million per week.
To bring the point home, I have put together a countdown timer which will be updated monthly with my estimate of the date when 50% of US cell phone subscribers will be using smartphones. (There is a link to the timer at the top right of every page on this blog).
I pinned that 50% figure because by then I hope people will stop calling them smartphones and begin calling them phones.
It’s a great misfortune that we don’t have data about the future. It makes it hard to tell what’s going to happen.
It’s even harder because although sometimes we have data about the past, the past and the future don’t always look the same.
Clearly that’s what makes predictions about mobile computing platforms tricky. Nothing that has happened recently had been predicted by those who had tried to do so in the past.
The difficulty is compounded if trying to forecast in the long term like 4 or 5 years ahead. The tendency is to extrapolate what has been happening to date.
When I began the series of posts on Google vs. Android I put forward some questions about the business logic of Google becoming an operating system supplier, especially as that role can be seen as being counter-productive to Google’s strategy.
I noted three strategy costs associated with a zero priced systems software bundle.
More fundamentally, Google-as-systems-software is asymmetric to Google-as-cloud-software and contradicts the value proposition that Google enables value in the web not in accessing the web. Android appears to be a nod in the direction that systems software still matters.
In my numerous posts on the need for integrated development Continue reading “Google vs. Android Part V”
Two years ago:
With new netbooks, laptops, desktops, and, yes, a smartphone, Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci explains why he expects to soon overtake No. 2 PC maker Dell
via Acer Boss Lanci Takes Aim at Dell and HP – BusinessWeek.
Today Acer CEO and President Gianfranco Lanci resigned with immediate effect. Acer is in trouble. You can read more on Acer’s current problems in the wake of the downward revision of its sales targets for two quarters here: Acer Should Overhaul Its Operation: Stan Shih | CENS.com – The Taiwan Economic News
In a nutshell, whereas Acer under Lanci took aim at Dell and HP, it seems that Apple took aim at Acer. And whereas Lanci missed, Apple’s aim was true.
What is interesting here is that Acer had a very disruptive approach. They used the low end “netbook” concept to take share from incumbents motivated to move up-market.
But what went wrong? Continue reading “Disruptive failure: How Acer Took Aim at Dell and HP and missed”
IDC released a new forecast for the worldwide smartphone market which included a long range forecast–all the way to 2015.
Most people fixated on the share data in 2015. Not hard to do since whoever wrote the press release highlighted this flashy headline. Putting aside the three significant digits of accuracy on every data point and the hard to swallow declaration that a painfully underperforming (in more ways than one) Windows Phone will overtake iOS and BlackBerry to become the second largest platform by units/year in 2015, there is much more to the report.
Using only the public data from the press release we can put together a pretty good picture of the transition being forecast and determine some of the (unstated) assumptions being made. It’s these assumptions about the underlying market dynamics which illuminate far more than the falsely precise share data.
Continue reading “The controversy of playing it safe: What's IDC's Smartphone Market Message?”
The World-Wide Developer Conference is an event for developers. It is not a trade show and it is not a consumer show or an enterprise show for salespeople. Except for the keynote, all events are subject to Non-disclosure Agreements so it’s not even an event whose proceedings can be discussed openly.
It’s also expensive. Registration is at least $1,500. Attendants are there to learn and ask detailed questions about development. It’s not for deal making. People not familiar with development would not be well served by the event. Registrations are therefore somewhat limited to about 5000.
After the iPhone SDK was launched, the WWDC took on a new dimension. It became a mobile development event. As a result, 2008 was the first year when WWDC sold out. Attendance tripled over the Mac-only event the previous year.
Every year since, not only has WWDC sold out but it has sold out quicker every time. The following chart shows the days it took to sell out WWDC. I also added Google I/O data for comparison.
In the era of the iPhone, the limited resource of attendant seats has always been exhausted at accelerated rates: from 60 days in 2008 to 0.5 days in 2011. A similar pattern emerged for the Android event.
What should be noted is that these events are focused on post-PC development[1][2]. Clearly the increased interest among developers is for the mobile side of the business.
Developers certainly seem to sense the way the wind is blowing. They are, as humans, prone to over-confidence but they are also often accused of being hard to please. The most common lament among new platform builders is “How do we attract developers?” The platforms showcased here had no trouble attracting developers in the tens of thousands three years after being launched.
The Post-PC era is evident in all kinds of data. This set (developer attendance to mobile development) is particularly stark. It’s a proxy for investment and IT interest. There is a non-linear nature to this growth and history shows that non-linearity leads to unpredictable or unforeseeable change.
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Notes:
Yesterday RIM reported their quarterly earnings. The results were mixed to slightly negative and the shares were down 10% in after-hours trading.
I’ll work through the smartphone market data at a later time but for now what I want to focus on is RIM’s strategy which really means understanding RIM’s intentions or their approach to the market. For that we have to go straight to the source: what management actually says. Trouble is, management often speaks in a jargon that is unfamiliar to people (sometimes unfamiliar to anyone outside the company).
Strategy analysis involves translation. So here follows the interpretation of Jim Balsillie’s remarks during the conference call (transcript sourced from Businessinsider.com). Continue reading “Understanding RIM's tablet platform app strategy”
AT&T’s intent to acquire T-Mobile USA is subject to regulatory approval. Will regulators look at the deal through the lenses of sustaining the traditional industry’s profit allocation or through the lenses of device-led disruption?
In theory, regulators are to make a determination on whether the deal will reduce customer choice. But the question is really choice of what? The focus is presumably on the choice of service plans. That’s understandable, however coupled to that choice is the choice of devices and even more importantly, the choice of platforms.
The trouble is that US consumers have never had much choice and the US wireless marketplace has been a minefield of incompatibilities and obstacles to market forces.
