7 ms·

Android Won. Windows Lost

96 points by cramforce 14y ago

ChuckMcM 14y ago
I wonder if this guy did the Googlezon video (that is the one where Google and Amazon merge and become a planet dominating company) people would start work at Google and then post it to the company wide 'misc' mailing list. It was almost like clockwork. I think Android has had an impressive run. There is an interesting article about how it dominates Chinese smartphones but Google isn't getting any return on that investment (80% of Android phones in China ship with Baidu as the search provider). That is something that didn't happen with Windows.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > That is something that didn't happen with Windows. Baidu dominates on the desktop in China as well. China is a unique situation, since the government actively encourages domestic copycats of foreign companies while preventing/making it difficult for those foreign companies trying to enter the Chinese market.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    Yes, it dominates the desktop, but Microsoft doesn't depend on search revenue quite like Google does.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      I guess most copies of Windows in China are pirate too.
      - wutbrodo 14y ago
        Yup, by Ballmer's estimate (as of early 2011), 90% of the copies of Windows in China are pirated. http://www.neowin.net/news/ballmer-9-out-of-10-copies-of-windows-in-china-is-pirated http://www.neowin.net/news/ballmer-9-out-of-10-copies-of-win...
- JoshTriplett 14y ago
  Google doesn't just make money on Android via search; they have a pile of other services integrated with Android, and they also make money from app sales and ad-infested apps.
  - tadfisher 14y ago
    Can ads not be used responsibly? Must apps with embedded ads be referred to as "infested"?
    - stcredzero 14y ago
      Economic forces always push ad use towards "annoying."
      - tadfisher 14y ago
        Do they, really? Would that not result in less revenue as people move to your less-annoying competition?
        JoshTriplett 14y ago
        The less-annoying competition pays less, and end users don't have a choice of ad "vendors"; only app authors have that choice. App authors will choose whatever maximizes revenue; if more annoying ads drive off a few users but bring it more revenue from the remainder, the app will use more annoying ads.
        pixl97 14y ago
        If it did everyone would use chrome/firefox with adblock. A huge portion of the population seems to put up with all the ads thrown at them.
        stcredzero 14y ago
        I didn't say it would push things to infinitely annoying. But the needle gets stuck leaning that way.
- e12e 14y ago
  > here is an interesting article about how it dominates Chinese smartphones but Google isn't getting any return on that investment (80% of Android phones in China ship with Baidu as the search provider). They still maintain Google as the app-store though? So Google gets ~30% of every app/media-item sold?
  - Permit 14y ago
    Doesn't Google's App Store tend towards free apps moreso than others? I don't have an Android phone but I remember that was the case previously. Angry Birds was a paid app on both Apple's and Microsoft's store, but free on Android for some reason.
  - gbog 14y ago
    no, most androids don't even have Google app store in China. When we ship our apps we have a bot pushing to over 20 android markets.
  - untog 14y ago
    I'm not sure that they do. AFAIK, they take open-source Android (that is, with no Google apps) and build on it.
Executor 14y ago
The idea of doing ALL payments and transactions by mobile is a horrible future. It is the lack of privacy that cash gives us, and the complete dependence on mobile phones, corporations, and banks. What about people that don't want to have smart phones and refuse to pay via paperless? We have the ability to choose what technology to use - let's not get rid of cash shall we?
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  Who says we have to lose our privacy because we use digital payments? Just take a look at Bitcoin.
  - politician 14y ago
    Bitcoin provides a number of great features, but anonymity is not one of them.
    - w1ntermute 14y ago
      By that token, neither is cash money - every bill has a unique serial number.
      - DougBTX 14y ago
        Each "bill" in bitcoin includes a full transaction history, which gets shared with every other bitcoin user. It's quite different knowing that a dollar bill got from A to B, vs a bitcoin which tells you exactly how it travelled from A to B.
      - anonymfus 14y ago
        Where I can see analogue of http://blockchain.info/new-transactions http://blockchain.info/new-transactions for cash?
    - sounds 14y ago
      Please explain. Bitcoins are inherently anonymous, it's just hard to convert between bitcoins and real-world goods/services/currency without identifying a wallet. This is not a social problem (can't be solved with technology, even though lots of tech tries). This is a technical problem (advances in privacy services can make bitcoins more easy to use safely).
deleted 14y ago
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bicknergseng 14y ago
"Today latest Q3 data and 20 months after Nokia CEO annoucned the premature death of Symbian, in Q3 Symbian sales has collapsed from the 29% market share it had when Elop announced it, to 2% now." So tired of this total misuse of a statistic. Yes, Symbian had ~29% of the market when they switch to backing WP7. However, that's leaving out the fact that 29% is down from 47% in 2009, and that the rate at which people were abandoning Symbian for Android continued to increase. Furthermore, that market share was almost entirely cheap dumbphones. The reality is that Symbian was never a popular smartphone platform and was not ready for a global shift from dumbphones to smartphones, and that Apple and Android disrupted that market and split it among themselves. That whole section was littered with ranty inaccuracies. OP goes on to talk about "Windows Phone 6" as a confused combination of WinMo 6.5 and WP7.
- sounds 14y ago
  Nokia had the N900. They had MeeGo (back before it was a joke). They had a good shot at being part of the smartphone market. What other "ranty innacuracies" would you like to point out? Windows Phone 6 was a (mild) typo for Windows Mobile 6. (Not WP7)
  - bcoates 14y ago
    By the time the N900 came out Nokia had already lost to iPhones and Androids. It's predecessor devices were neat but they weren't phones, the N800 was a weird little pocket-sized tablet. Usability of the whole series was underwhelming.
    - jerf 14y ago
      "Lost" to iPhones? Sure. Lost to Android? A lot harder call. Certainly Apple partisans of the time were still in full Android-dismissal mode. That was 2009; what if they'd stuck with it and kept improving it? No guarantees, but they at least would have had a seat at the table. Nokia spent some of the most formative years in this market not even sitting at the table while they waited for their Windows phone to come out. Plus given the Linux base at the core of both Android and Maemo, had there been more resources put into it, it seems like there's a reasonable chance they could have been in a position to come to some sort of accommodation with Android, perhaps being able to run some apps, or at least making it easy to target both.
politician 14y ago
Maybe Microsoft will buy T-Mobile and let Skype loose on it.
jiggy2011 14y ago
Never seen anyone use an android workstation as their main work system though. I have an android phone and a PC. I spend ~8-10 hours on the PC and probably < 1 hour on the phone. Not saying it won't happen , but it seems a little premature to call "victory" just yet.
- rbanffy 14y ago
  > Never seen anyone use an android workstation as their main work system though Me neither, but if the hardware specs are right, it's a breeze to install a full Ubuntu userland and work from there. I don't think anyone will ever want to run a heavy IDE (such as Eclipse or Visual Studio) on any machine that was designed to be power efficient rather than fast, but I have no problem developing for Django, Flask or App Engine on my aging Atom (N270, IIRC) netbook. And, if I develop on a remote host (as I do, when I need serious computing power), all I need is bandwidth, a decent screen (all my phones have HDMI outputs), a keyboard and, maybe, a pointing device (easy, since all of my Android devices have Bluetooth). The more people read their e-mail and manage their shared work documents through a browser, the less they need a desktop PC. Soon enough, the desktop PC will follow the path of the Unix workstation and be relegated to a niche where being able to locally process locally stored data is important. If I were Steve Ballmer, I'd retire right now and never, ever, worry about Microsoft again.
clarky07 14y ago
It turns out its easier to "sell" lots of copies of something for free. Microsoft actually sold those > 1 billion copies of windows. Google still makes almost nothing on android. This article was absurdly over the top IMO.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  Microsoft makes money on the one off sale and then essentially zero from then on. Google makes zero on the sale, but then makes money from then on. Asymco has the numbers from 6 months ago: http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/14/the-android-income-statement/ http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/14/the-android-income-statemen... Also note that the more recent the version of Android, the higher they monetize: http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2012/10/24/androids-jelly-bean-generates-1-63-arpu-35-percent-higher-than-gingerbreads-1-20/ http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2012/10/24/androids-jelly-be...
  - e12e 14y ago
    Which may be why windows 8 bundles an appstore and infrastructure for ads.
  - clarky07 14y ago
    You refute my statement that they make almost nothing with an ARPU of $1.63 and a 500 mil profit? seriously? Microsoft made over 20 billion net profit in 2011 and Apple has an ARPU around $600.
    - rogerbinns 14y ago
      Revenues and profits are a trailing indicator not a leading indicator. They reflect what the company has done in the past, not what is happening in the future. My point is that measurements have changed from one offs to lifetime value. (That is not to dismiss Microsoft's two decades of impressive financial performance.) Note that Apple's ARPU number includes COGS for the hardware which Google doesn't incur (Samsung et al do).
      - 14y ago
fumar 14y ago
This vision of the world feels like it was dreamed up by a science fiction author. I understand Android is growing. But, I can not help but think he is answering the wrong question. Honestly, I do not know what the right question is. It reads like a narrow view of the market, global economy, and fads. I look at my very young cousins. They are growing up with iPads and iPhones not Google products. (observations)
- kumarm 14y ago
  Apple losing market share significantly in both India and China where pretty much Android has closer 90% marketshare.
  - vvhn 14y ago
    In India at least, Apple/iOS never had anything resembling meaningful marketshare. Android has replaced Symbian and whatever's left of blackberry as the ubiquitous platform powering phones from INR 5000 ($95 ) to INR 35000 ($625) not "taken away marketshare from Apple" since they didn't have any begin with.
  - fumar 14y ago
    Good Point, by shear population, they dictate a lot. I will think about this some more. One global company becoming a leader, by a large margin, is something I dislike. Too much power in the hands of one piece of software.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Why do people point out these anecdotes as if they refute real numbers and trends? India and China aren't the only places where Apple is losing (relative) mobile marketshare.
- dannyr 14y ago
  Actually you are the one with the narrow view of the market. Look beyond your young cousins. The rest of the world are using Android devices not Apple. Android phones has 80+% market share in a number of countries in Europe. Worldwide, Android tablets are slowly gaining market share from the IPad. In Africa, Android phones cost less than $100. In a few years, it might be under $50. A lot of poor people will not be able to afford a PC but a cheap phone is probably the only computer they'll ever have.
cageface 14y ago
The Platform of the Century will power cameras, credit cards, cellphones, computers, consoles, clocks This is why I've decided to crosstrain from iOS to Android. I think Apple is going to continue to do well for many years but Android is going to be much bigger than just phones. I expect solid Android experience to be very much in demand.
- Dove 14y ago
  I do Android freelancing, and I'm starting to see requests for apps that look more like traditional embedded software than smartphone apps. Controllers for industrial equipment, personal medical devices, props in simulations. Real Technology stuff. That's not exactly new, but my perception is that it's picked up a lot in the last few months. And I think it's just the tip of the iceberg. For anything you can imagine wanting to control with a touchscreen, putting a cheap Android display in a case and connecting up over USB or Bluetooth seems to be making a lot of sense to people. I fully expect Android skills to be profoundly in demand in a year or two. Study up now; it's not really a quick system to master.
  - cageface 14y ago
    Exactly. I've got a couple of apps about to hit the app store so I'm gradually making my way up the curve. I agree it's not the easiest API to learn. The basics are actually pretty straightforward but the details you have to consider once you start doing real apps can be tricky. I'm really hoping Kotlin takes off as an alternative Android development language though. Java's OK but a more modern and flexible language would certainly help. Do you have any good pointers or references for Android dev in these kinds of environments?
    - dannyr 14y ago
      I built a site to share tips for Android development. See http://android.steerway.com http://android.steerway.com. I'm behind on the content updates but I'll have them by the end of the year.
    - w1ntermute 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
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gurkendoktor 14y ago
I don't get it, and I found it very hard to read meaning into all the superlatives. Haven't there been more Linux devices than Windows devices for a long time now? For every PC that maps 1:1 to the owner's digital life, there are probably three toasters and a smart fridge running Linux. In the future, they will run Android. How does that help Google or hurt Microsoft? Apple could probably switch all their non-iOS iPods to run a modified Android and not a single thing would change. So far, Android has only "won" the smartphone game by numbers. And in the process, Samsung has become an internal monopoly. I'm not convinced that this is the solid foundation on which mankind's digital future will be built.
- pacala 14y ago
  The Linux devices out there were all lacking a good GUI layer. From the perspective of a consumer they were primitive, ugly and barely functional.
  - gurkendoktor 14y ago
    But will Android clothes have an awesome UI layer? Not to downplay Android's success, I find it very hard to follow the jump from smartphones to everything else. I don't see Android scaling up (to run on computers like Windows 8). And when it scales down, Google doesn't win anything. The OP reminds me of business analysts in the last years. Some metric in the PRC increases XX% year over year, and a short back-of-the-envelope calculation later, Westerners shouldn't teach their kids anything but Mandarin anymore. And Android is not even as autonomous as the PRC. Suppose it runs on 99% of all devices (whatever that means at the time) - I can easily imagine a court forcibly separating Google's services from the OS.
ricardobeat 14y ago
Too much hyperbole. Things change quickly these days, and I hope we don't see java "embedded within humans" anytime in the future.
- tnuc 14y ago
  There is a pacemaker that uses java.
huggah 14y ago
Too much hyperbole, but I was struck by this, which I hadn't considered before: "We often go to Amazon just to search something - to see what else Amazon recommends. We are quite literally accessing Amazon 'just to see ads'." I haven't seen a clearer demonstration of the argument that ads, properly targeted and displayed at the right times, provide positive value to the user.
- pixl97 14y ago
  People don't like most advertising because it's lying to them, or at least covering up it's faults (turd rolled in glitter). I mean, what company is going to pay to tell everything about their product. There going to show it in the best light. When people buy something they want to be informed (doesn't a free market require this?). With sites like Amazon or Newegg you get more information about the product and similar products that is supposedly neutral. They don't care 'which' product you buy, as long as you buy it from them. The customer benefits by exposure to more choices, better products, and possibly better pricing. This does not work as well for vendors, they do not care who you buy from, as long as you buy their product.
  - B-Con 14y ago
    The lesson from that is that customers are more likely to trust ads that come from the marketplace, not the sellers. The original point is very good and can be extended a bit: Customers don't hate ads, they hate modern advertising. Obviously, the marketplace does have some incentive to lie, because they want you to buy something rather than nothing, but they certainly seem less biased. Especially when it comes to relatively fungible goods, they don't care which DVD you buy so long as you buy one, they don't care if product X is way better than Y or about as good as Y, so long as you buy one of them. Unless it's their own product or a very unique product, most goods are relatively fungible from the marketplace's perspective. Now lets hope the marketplace doesn't secretly sell ad space, disguised as their own "recommendations". It would probably be completely against their best interest to do so, but if a lot of cash were on the line, well, who knows. (They risk their reputation, but if the replacement was plausible, how would they get caught?)
zmmmmm 14y ago
The big problem I have with this kind of analysis is that it's all extrapolation based on existing conditions, with the assumption that nothing disruptive will happen from here on out. You could have done the same analysis at various points in time and concluded that Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry and iOS were all going to dominate the future. The very nature of technology is disruptive and we simply cannot predict what's going to happen next. Having said that, if this vision does come to fruition, I think it is a wonderful thing for humanity. The fact that the OS that comes to dominate the planet is free, open source and available on (nearly)equal terms to everyone from the most powerful and rich on the planet to the most poor and deprived is a truly amazing and awesome feat. A few years ago I looked at the growth of iOS and truly feared that humanity was headed for a very different future - one where the poor were separated and disenfranchised by their inability to afford access to the dominant mobile platform and the rich were slavishly bound to the constraints of a locked down and tightly controlled ecosystem where all decisions made would be in the interest of the largest company on earth. This latter future did not come to pass, and I am very glad for that (even as I admire and love using Apple products).
- ddw 14y ago
  Yeah, when he gets into Android forecasts for 2014 with one in every four people or whatever - a bit much. But like you I think its pretty amazing that I can put the same OS on my Raspberry Pi, any crappy tablet, my phone and whatever else at the same rate as the rest of the world for practically nothing.
genuine 14y ago
Windows will not have lost until Microsoft goes bankrupt. Mobile platforms are really just a fad. The future will be essentially a distributed OS, where devices throughout the home interact with a larger system to provide a much more immersive and practical experience. Few will give a fuck about iOS and Android in 10 years Apple is going to be focusing on novel user input with their new T.V. They've already provided Airplay, etc. but other than music, streaming video, and other information provided by screens and tablets, what are they providing? Microsoft has a head start with kinect, so if they invested in related research, touch screens, and other novel input devices like the LEAP, they might be able to compete in the future. By placing kinect-like devices around the home with some mics and speakers, you could talk to your computer like in the original Star Trek ("Computer, how hot will it be today?") or make a gesture in the air to turn on and off lights or lock doors. That would be something people would buy.
- watmough 14y ago
  This is a good point. I believe, that in the end, the browser will win. The Mozilla OS on phone will go somewhere, and many many apps will move into the browser, both on the low-end phone hardware, and on high-end laptop hardware.
- solnyshok 14y ago
  while android may become the hardware layer king, I think it will be overshadowed by html/js for GUI.
Roybatty 14y ago
3 seems to be a magic number. I think eventually Microsoft will have significant share of the mobile/tablet market.
Zigurd 14y ago
So far the vast majority of top-level comments on this thread slag the article for hyperbole. But it is very likely true. Although the installed base of Android systems is small compared to what Windows has piled up over ten years of near total hegemony, Android's market share is growing at a rate that makes Tomi Ahonens's prediction a very good bet indeed. Remember this prediction, and start acting on it now. My prediction is that two years from now Hacker News will be full of posts about how nobody predicted how pervasive Android has become.

96 points by cramforce 14y ago

I wonder if this guy did the Googlezon video (that is the one where Google and Amazon merge and become a planet dominating company) people would start work at Google and then post it to the company wide 'misc' mailing list. It was almost like clockwork. I think Android has had an impressive run. There is an interesting article about how it dominates Chinese smartphones but Google isn't getting any return on that investment (80% of Android phones in China ship with Baidu as the search provider). That is something that didn't happen with Windows.

w1ntermute 14y ago
> That is something that didn't happen with Windows. Baidu dominates on the desktop in China as well. China is a unique situation, since the government actively encourages domestic copycats of foreign companies while preventing/making it difficult for those foreign companies trying to enter the Chinese market.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Yes, it dominates the desktop, but Microsoft doesn't depend on search revenue quite like Google does.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    I guess most copies of Windows in China are pirate too.
    - wutbrodo 14y ago
      Yup, by Ballmer's estimate (as of early 2011), 90% of the copies of Windows in China are pirated. http://www.neowin.net/news/ballmer-9-out-of-10-copies-of-windows-in-china-is-pirated http://www.neowin.net/news/ballmer-9-out-of-10-copies-of-win...
JoshTriplett 14y ago
Google doesn't just make money on Android via search; they have a pile of other services integrated with Android, and they also make money from app sales and ad-infested apps.
- tadfisher 14y ago
  Can ads not be used responsibly? Must apps with embedded ads be referred to as "infested"?
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    Economic forces always push ad use towards "annoying."
    - tadfisher 14y ago
      Do they, really? Would that not result in less revenue as people move to your less-annoying competition?
      - JoshTriplett 14y ago
        The less-annoying competition pays less, and end users don't have a choice of ad "vendors"; only app authors have that choice. App authors will choose whatever maximizes revenue; if more annoying ads drive off a few users but bring it more revenue from the remainder, the app will use more annoying ads.
      - pixl97 14y ago
        If it did everyone would use chrome/firefox with adblock. A huge portion of the population seems to put up with all the ads thrown at them.
        stcredzero 14y ago
        I didn't say it would push things to infinitely annoying. But the needle gets stuck leaning that way.
e12e 14y ago
> here is an interesting article about how it dominates Chinese smartphones but Google isn't getting any return on that investment (80% of Android phones in China ship with Baidu as the search provider). They still maintain Google as the app-store though? So Google gets ~30% of every app/media-item sold?
- Permit 14y ago
  Doesn't Google's App Store tend towards free apps moreso than others? I don't have an Android phone but I remember that was the case previously. Angry Birds was a paid app on both Apple's and Microsoft's store, but free on Android for some reason.
- gbog 14y ago
  no, most androids don't even have Google app store in China. When we ship our apps we have a bot pushing to over 20 android markets.
- untog 14y ago
  I'm not sure that they do. AFAIK, they take open-source Android (that is, with no Google apps) and build on it.

Executor 14y ago

The idea of doing ALL payments and transactions by mobile is a horrible future. It is the lack of privacy that cash gives us, and the complete dependence on mobile phones, corporations, and banks. What about people that don't want to have smart phones and refuse to pay via paperless? We have the ability to choose what technology to use - let's not get rid of cash shall we?

w1ntermute 14y ago
Who says we have to lose our privacy because we use digital payments? Just take a look at Bitcoin.
- politician 14y ago
  Bitcoin provides a number of great features, but anonymity is not one of them.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago
    By that token, neither is cash money - every bill has a unique serial number.
    - DougBTX 14y ago
      Each "bill" in bitcoin includes a full transaction history, which gets shared with every other bitcoin user. It's quite different knowing that a dollar bill got from A to B, vs a bitcoin which tells you exactly how it travelled from A to B.
    - anonymfus 14y ago
      Where I can see analogue of http://blockchain.info/new-transactions http://blockchain.info/new-transactions for cash?
  - sounds 14y ago
    Please explain. Bitcoins are inherently anonymous, it's just hard to convert between bitcoins and real-world goods/services/currency without identifying a wallet. This is not a social problem (can't be solved with technology, even though lots of tech tries). This is a technical problem (advances in privacy services can make bitcoins more easy to use safely).

deleted 14y ago

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bicknergseng 14y ago

"Today latest Q3 data and 20 months after Nokia CEO annoucned the premature death of Symbian, in Q3 Symbian sales has collapsed from the 29% market share it had when Elop announced it, to 2% now." So tired of this total misuse of a statistic. Yes, Symbian had ~29% of the market when they switch to backing WP7. However, that's leaving out the fact that 29% is down from 47% in 2009, and that the rate at which people were abandoning Symbian for Android continued to increase. Furthermore, that market share was almost entirely cheap dumbphones. The reality is that Symbian was never a popular smartphone platform and was not ready for a global shift from dumbphones to smartphones, and that Apple and Android disrupted that market and split it among themselves. That whole section was littered with ranty inaccuracies. OP goes on to talk about "Windows Phone 6" as a confused combination of WinMo 6.5 and WP7.

sounds 14y ago
Nokia had the N900. They had MeeGo (back before it was a joke). They had a good shot at being part of the smartphone market. What other "ranty innacuracies" would you like to point out? Windows Phone 6 was a (mild) typo for Windows Mobile 6. (Not WP7)
- bcoates 14y ago
  By the time the N900 came out Nokia had already lost to iPhones and Androids. It's predecessor devices were neat but they weren't phones, the N800 was a weird little pocket-sized tablet. Usability of the whole series was underwhelming.
  - jerf 14y ago
    "Lost" to iPhones? Sure. Lost to Android? A lot harder call. Certainly Apple partisans of the time were still in full Android-dismissal mode. That was 2009; what if they'd stuck with it and kept improving it? No guarantees, but they at least would have had a seat at the table. Nokia spent some of the most formative years in this market not even sitting at the table while they waited for their Windows phone to come out. Plus given the Linux base at the core of both Android and Maemo, had there been more resources put into it, it seems like there's a reasonable chance they could have been in a position to come to some sort of accommodation with Android, perhaps being able to run some apps, or at least making it easy to target both.

politician 14y ago

Maybe Microsoft will buy T-Mobile and let Skype loose on it.

jiggy2011 14y ago

Never seen anyone use an android workstation as their main work system though. I have an android phone and a PC. I spend ~8-10 hours on the PC and probably < 1 hour on the phone. Not saying it won't happen , but it seems a little premature to call "victory" just yet.

rbanffy 14y ago
> Never seen anyone use an android workstation as their main work system though Me neither, but if the hardware specs are right, it's a breeze to install a full Ubuntu userland and work from there. I don't think anyone will ever want to run a heavy IDE (such as Eclipse or Visual Studio) on any machine that was designed to be power efficient rather than fast, but I have no problem developing for Django, Flask or App Engine on my aging Atom (N270, IIRC) netbook. And, if I develop on a remote host (as I do, when I need serious computing power), all I need is bandwidth, a decent screen (all my phones have HDMI outputs), a keyboard and, maybe, a pointing device (easy, since all of my Android devices have Bluetooth). The more people read their e-mail and manage their shared work documents through a browser, the less they need a desktop PC. Soon enough, the desktop PC will follow the path of the Unix workstation and be relegated to a niche where being able to locally process locally stored data is important. If I were Steve Ballmer, I'd retire right now and never, ever, worry about Microsoft again.

clarky07 14y ago

It turns out its easier to "sell" lots of copies of something for free. Microsoft actually sold those > 1 billion copies of windows. Google still makes almost nothing on android. This article was absurdly over the top IMO.

rogerbinns 14y ago
Microsoft makes money on the one off sale and then essentially zero from then on. Google makes zero on the sale, but then makes money from then on. Asymco has the numbers from 6 months ago: http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/14/the-android-income-statement/ http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/14/the-android-income-statemen... Also note that the more recent the version of Android, the higher they monetize: http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2012/10/24/androids-jelly-bean-generates-1-63-arpu-35-percent-higher-than-gingerbreads-1-20/ http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2012/10/24/androids-jelly-be...
- e12e 14y ago
  Which may be why windows 8 bundles an appstore and infrastructure for ads.
- clarky07 14y ago
  You refute my statement that they make almost nothing with an ARPU of $1.63 and a 500 mil profit? seriously? Microsoft made over 20 billion net profit in 2011 and Apple has an ARPU around $600.
  - rogerbinns 14y ago
    Revenues and profits are a trailing indicator not a leading indicator. They reflect what the company has done in the past, not what is happening in the future. My point is that measurements have changed from one offs to lifetime value. (That is not to dismiss Microsoft's two decades of impressive financial performance.) Note that Apple's ARPU number includes COGS for the hardware which Google doesn't incur (Samsung et al do).
    - 14y ago

fumar 14y ago

This vision of the world feels like it was dreamed up by a science fiction author. I understand Android is growing. But, I can not help but think he is answering the wrong question. Honestly, I do not know what the right question is. It reads like a narrow view of the market, global economy, and fads. I look at my very young cousins. They are growing up with iPads and iPhones not Google products. (observations)

kumarm 14y ago
Apple losing market share significantly in both India and China where pretty much Android has closer 90% marketshare.
- vvhn 14y ago
  In India at least, Apple/iOS never had anything resembling meaningful marketshare. Android has replaced Symbian and whatever's left of blackberry as the ubiquitous platform powering phones from INR 5000 ($95 ) to INR 35000 ($625) not "taken away marketshare from Apple" since they didn't have any begin with.
- fumar 14y ago
  Good Point, by shear population, they dictate a lot. I will think about this some more. One global company becoming a leader, by a large margin, is something I dislike. Too much power in the hands of one piece of software.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Why do people point out these anecdotes as if they refute real numbers and trends? India and China aren't the only places where Apple is losing (relative) mobile marketshare.
dannyr 14y ago
Actually you are the one with the narrow view of the market. Look beyond your young cousins. The rest of the world are using Android devices not Apple. Android phones has 80+% market share in a number of countries in Europe. Worldwide, Android tablets are slowly gaining market share from the IPad. In Africa, Android phones cost less than $100. In a few years, it might be under $50. A lot of poor people will not be able to afford a PC but a cheap phone is probably the only computer they'll ever have.

cageface 14y ago

The Platform of the Century will power cameras, credit cards, cellphones, computers, consoles, clocks This is why I've decided to crosstrain from iOS to Android. I think Apple is going to continue to do well for many years but Android is going to be much bigger than just phones. I expect solid Android experience to be very much in demand.

Dove 14y ago
I do Android freelancing, and I'm starting to see requests for apps that look more like traditional embedded software than smartphone apps. Controllers for industrial equipment, personal medical devices, props in simulations. Real Technology stuff. That's not exactly new, but my perception is that it's picked up a lot in the last few months. And I think it's just the tip of the iceberg. For anything you can imagine wanting to control with a touchscreen, putting a cheap Android display in a case and connecting up over USB or Bluetooth seems to be making a lot of sense to people. I fully expect Android skills to be profoundly in demand in a year or two. Study up now; it's not really a quick system to master.
- cageface 14y ago
  Exactly. I've got a couple of apps about to hit the app store so I'm gradually making my way up the curve. I agree it's not the easiest API to learn. The basics are actually pretty straightforward but the details you have to consider once you start doing real apps can be tricky. I'm really hoping Kotlin takes off as an alternative Android development language though. Java's OK but a more modern and flexible language would certainly help. Do you have any good pointers or references for Android dev in these kinds of environments?
  - dannyr 14y ago
    I built a site to share tips for Android development. See http://android.steerway.com http://android.steerway.com. I'm behind on the content updates but I'll have them by the end of the year.
  - w1ntermute 14y ago

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gurkendoktor 14y ago

I don't get it, and I found it very hard to read meaning into all the superlatives. Haven't there been more Linux devices than Windows devices for a long time now? For every PC that maps 1:1 to the owner's digital life, there are probably three toasters and a smart fridge running Linux. In the future, they will run Android. How does that help Google or hurt Microsoft? Apple could probably switch all their non-iOS iPods to run a modified Android and not a single thing would change. So far, Android has only "won" the smartphone game by numbers. And in the process, Samsung has become an internal monopoly. I'm not convinced that this is the solid foundation on which mankind's digital future will be built.

pacala 14y ago
The Linux devices out there were all lacking a good GUI layer. From the perspective of a consumer they were primitive, ugly and barely functional.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  But will Android clothes have an awesome UI layer? Not to downplay Android's success, I find it very hard to follow the jump from smartphones to everything else. I don't see Android scaling up (to run on computers like Windows 8). And when it scales down, Google doesn't win anything. The OP reminds me of business analysts in the last years. Some metric in the PRC increases XX% year over year, and a short back-of-the-envelope calculation later, Westerners shouldn't teach their kids anything but Mandarin anymore. And Android is not even as autonomous as the PRC. Suppose it runs on 99% of all devices (whatever that means at the time) - I can easily imagine a court forcibly separating Google's services from the OS.

ricardobeat 14y ago

Too much hyperbole. Things change quickly these days, and I hope we don't see java "embedded within humans" anytime in the future.

tnuc 14y ago
There is a pacemaker that uses java.

huggah 14y ago

Too much hyperbole, but I was struck by this, which I hadn't considered before: "We often go to Amazon just to search something - to see what else Amazon recommends. We are quite literally accessing Amazon 'just to see ads'." I haven't seen a clearer demonstration of the argument that ads, properly targeted and displayed at the right times, provide positive value to the user.

pixl97 14y ago
People don't like most advertising because it's lying to them, or at least covering up it's faults (turd rolled in glitter). I mean, what company is going to pay to tell everything about their product. There going to show it in the best light. When people buy something they want to be informed (doesn't a free market require this?). With sites like Amazon or Newegg you get more information about the product and similar products that is supposedly neutral. They don't care 'which' product you buy, as long as you buy it from them. The customer benefits by exposure to more choices, better products, and possibly better pricing. This does not work as well for vendors, they do not care who you buy from, as long as you buy their product.
- B-Con 14y ago
  The lesson from that is that customers are more likely to trust ads that come from the marketplace, not the sellers. The original point is very good and can be extended a bit: Customers don't hate ads, they hate modern advertising. Obviously, the marketplace does have some incentive to lie, because they want you to buy something rather than nothing, but they certainly seem less biased. Especially when it comes to relatively fungible goods, they don't care which DVD you buy so long as you buy one, they don't care if product X is way better than Y or about as good as Y, so long as you buy one of them. Unless it's their own product or a very unique product, most goods are relatively fungible from the marketplace's perspective. Now lets hope the marketplace doesn't secretly sell ad space, disguised as their own "recommendations". It would probably be completely against their best interest to do so, but if a lot of cash were on the line, well, who knows. (They risk their reputation, but if the replacement was plausible, how would they get caught?)

zmmmmm 14y ago

The big problem I have with this kind of analysis is that it's all extrapolation based on existing conditions, with the assumption that nothing disruptive will happen from here on out. You could have done the same analysis at various points in time and concluded that Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry and iOS were all going to dominate the future. The very nature of technology is disruptive and we simply cannot predict what's going to happen next. Having said that, if this vision does come to fruition, I think it is a wonderful thing for humanity. The fact that the OS that comes to dominate the planet is free, open source and available on (nearly)equal terms to everyone from the most powerful and rich on the planet to the most poor and deprived is a truly amazing and awesome feat. A few years ago I looked at the growth of iOS and truly feared that humanity was headed for a very different future - one where the poor were separated and disenfranchised by their inability to afford access to the dominant mobile platform and the rich were slavishly bound to the constraints of a locked down and tightly controlled ecosystem where all decisions made would be in the interest of the largest company on earth. This latter future did not come to pass, and I am very glad for that (even as I admire and love using Apple products).

ddw 14y ago
Yeah, when he gets into Android forecasts for 2014 with one in every four people or whatever - a bit much. But like you I think its pretty amazing that I can put the same OS on my Raspberry Pi, any crappy tablet, my phone and whatever else at the same rate as the rest of the world for practically nothing.

genuine 14y ago

Windows will not have lost until Microsoft goes bankrupt. Mobile platforms are really just a fad. The future will be essentially a distributed OS, where devices throughout the home interact with a larger system to provide a much more immersive and practical experience. Few will give a fuck about iOS and Android in 10 years Apple is going to be focusing on novel user input with their new T.V. They've already provided Airplay, etc. but other than music, streaming video, and other information provided by screens and tablets, what are they providing? Microsoft has a head start with kinect, so if they invested in related research, touch screens, and other novel input devices like the LEAP, they might be able to compete in the future. By placing kinect-like devices around the home with some mics and speakers, you could talk to your computer like in the original Star Trek ("Computer, how hot will it be today?") or make a gesture in the air to turn on and off lights or lock doors. That would be something people would buy.

watmough 14y ago
This is a good point. I believe, that in the end, the browser will win. The Mozilla OS on phone will go somewhere, and many many apps will move into the browser, both on the low-end phone hardware, and on high-end laptop hardware.
solnyshok 14y ago
while android may become the hardware layer king, I think it will be overshadowed by html/js for GUI.

Roybatty 14y ago

3 seems to be a magic number. I think eventually Microsoft will have significant share of the mobile/tablet market.

Zigurd 14y ago

So far the vast majority of top-level comments on this thread slag the article for hyperbole. But it is very likely true. Although the installed base of Android systems is small compared to what Windows has piled up over ten years of near total hegemony, Android's market share is growing at a rate that makes Tomi Ahonens's prediction a very good bet indeed. Remember this prediction, and start acting on it now. My prediction is that two years from now Hacker News will be full of posts about how nobody predicted how pervasive Android has become.