So how long do you need - 12 more years? Because that's how long MS has so far been trying and failing to get a decent market share of the smartphone market. They started with Windows Mobile back in April, 2000 and have always been playing catchup.
The critical error of the author is that it thinks that the "mobile device" train is a short, fast and modular train, gliding into the future on rails of virtualization, having just left the station of Grand Regulatory Capture Central
When it's more like a dilapidated, hodgepodge of bandwagons, each with their own castle walls, all propped up on the rails, sometimes; sometimes using their own temporary locomotion (you know, to make their car go faster than the rest of the train). and it's still being pushed down the tracks, not by the train going anywhere with a destination in mind for the passengers, but by being pushed down the tracks by others latching their bandwagon on the back and needing the extra room. It doesn't matter what the destination is, as long as people get on and pay for tickets.
Once the train is finished (it's never finished), you'll find that it doesn't go anywhere or move it just stretches from coast to coast. To get to your destination, you just move from one car to the next, on foot. As a result, the train pretty much is now just a place for bandits to tear away useful parts and build something that's actually mobile.
The Rails are HTML5, the cars are your platform of choice, and neither is capable of working together for the entire length of track.
"And even as Android’s market share has increased, iOS’s profit share has increased too."
This is not correct, iOS's profit share peaked in 2011. At any rate I agree iOS is doing fine.
I disagree with the bigger conclusion about Microsoft. Windows 8/RT/WP 8 literally just launched. Should we have judged the iPhone a failure based on Nokia's dominant profit position less then 6 months after the iPhone launched? That would be silly.
The thing is, the iPhone offered something Nokia was not offering, there was room to grow. Microsoft isn't offering anything new or compelling, they are playing catch up. They've muscled their way into markets late in the game before, but they seem to be getting less adept at it over time.
To say Microsoft isn't offering anything new or compelling is a matter of opinion. They are going to be the first company to offer the most consistent experience across phone, tablet, and computer.
I'm not concluding whether or not they will be successful, just saying that Microsoft may indeed be offering something compelling and new to consumers with tech devices (consistency).
As it stands now, I have two completely separate experiences on my Windows 8 laptop (desktop and metro), whereas I just have one on my Macbook Air that is approaching an iOS experience ever so slightly on each new OS X version. I'm not sure what position is being argued though. It seems like Apple is converging faster than Microsoft.
Most people do not want that consistent experience and do not care about it.
My girlfriend is working in a SME where they rely on a desktop app essential to their business which only runs on Windows... So they're forced to used Windows. Yet no one there buys Windows phones or tablet: they don't want to hear about it. A person there is perfectly happy buying a MacBook or MacBook Air (despite being forced to work on Windows), a Samsung smartphone "because it's cheaper than an iPhone" and an iPad or an Android tablet. They don't care about having "all iOS" or "all Windows" or "all Android". Nada. Zero. People don't want that. The only thing they do care about is being able to run their webapp from everywhere.
Best sentence heard today? "The company selling us the software (previously Windows-only) we need has now put the application in the cloud and we can use from any browser. We'll at last be able to use our Mac to work and get rid of Windows!".
The webapp revolution is under way and it's changing the way SMEs (the real backbone of the economy btw, representing more money than the corporate world) are using computers. They know they've been stuck in the Windows and Office milking cycle and they don't like it. People in SMEs are starting to realize that there's a way out and Microsoft-shops throughout the world who previously could survive by selling Windows-only software are now forced to move "to the cloud" or become irrelevant. Because the demand from the users is there.
Karma is a bitch. And it's coming right into Microsoft's face.
"Microsoft isn't offering anything new or compelling, they are playing catch up"
This assumes the market only wants new and not catch up. On the contrary, I think Android is where it is because Android caught up and delivered an iPhone-esque experience faster and better than competitors.
WP7 was newer and more original but flopped in the market against Android because of the above, among other reasons.
I must admit I'm surprised RT did not do better out of the gate. I had always assumed there was some segment of the business market for whom "real" office on a real tablet is a "shutup and take my money" proposition. I would have expected some large fortune 500's to just deploy them en-masse as an ultra-manageable office "appliance" for employees who don't need anything else. I would have thought Microsoft would have sewn up such deals in advance, even if they had to virtually give them away for publicity sake. The fact it hasn't happened should be quite worrying, I think.
> Only Samsung and Apple are competing in phones
I get a bit sick of this kind of line. Yes, sure, Samsung is on top now in the Android world. Only a short time ago HTC was on top. Now it's changed to Samsung. That's the very definition of competition. Now Google is shipping Nexus 4's via LG and LG can't make enough of them. To say there is no competition is utterly ridiculous.
The really shocking thing is that in the last quarter Microsoft's smart phone market share actually dropped. Even with the assistance of all the pent up demand of people waiting for Windows 8, it still went down. Even if there was no intrinsic market demand for these products I would have expected an initial surge from the faithful just to try out something new.
Wow, I didn't know that. It's terrible that iOS devices are more manageable in an enterprise than an RT device. I would have thought it would be bullet point #1 on the feature list. It's kind of telling really. RT seems very confused - shipping with Office seems to target it at business users. But being unsuable in a corporate environment makes it only viable as a consumer device. But then it's very expensive as a consumer device. Perhaps in the end it's just not right for anybody and that is the answer to why it's not sold well.
I think Surface Pro (i.e Windows 8) was meant to be their 'business' tablet OS though ... Win RT is sort of a halfway house for home users that want some form of windows compatibility.
There's this, and then there's also the fact that it's a large investment to replace desktops or laptops en masse with something brand new. Even corporations that have a form hardware refresh policy typically only replace user computers on a rolling 3 or 4 year cycle.
Besides day to day management (patching, A/V, GPOs, etc), what the inability to join a domain means for large companies is that they cannot track what they have in use in any useful way, primarily the useful way that Microsoft cares about when it comes to Enterprise Agreement negotiations. This is a huge bugbear, but one that millions of companies have to deal with triannually.
> The really shocking thing is that in the last quarter Microsoft's smart phone market share actually dropped.
Not shocking, there were still a lot of old WinMob (like HD1s) out there that hand't been replaced yet.
> Even if there was no intrinsic market demand for these products I would have expected an initial surge from the faithful just to try out something new.
In a universe where even the apple fanboy is a myth, I'm not sure there are any faithful anymore.
How many startups out there are kicking off some new product and basing their launch exclusively on Microsoft technologies? Even in recent memory, the only one I can think of would be StackExchange.
I _really_ like C#. But other than limited Mono support, you're forced into using or relying on your users to conform to Microsoft standards.
The Metro APIs are all based on the old Win32 APIs & COM. Sure .NET is supported, but it's certainly not the dominant language nor was it a nice clean break as they could've done.
Plus they've killed XNA and told people to switch their games from C# to C++ (especially on WP8).
WinRT is actually kind of neat: they've taken what were before .NET-only APIs (like WPF), wrapped them in some sort of reference counting technology, and made these APIs callable from C++ code in a fairly easy ways. Reference counting does seem like its displacing garbage collection a bit, but that was true for iOS also. C# interoperates transparently.
I'm a MS researcher but I don't speak for Microsoft. That being said, I'm a big fan of SharpDX and MonoGame for my personal projects. They work well enough that I have avoided going native. Ya, I'm still a bit miffed that this isn't supported out of the box, but in practice its easy to work around.
So why downvoted? Microsoft is not really supporting C#. No more Silverlight for that matter, and they are "born again natives" - ahem C++. Not that I would complain about it, it's just that they change their moods as if they had two party political system over there....
Something about the entire basis of this article urks me. Maybe it is from me starting into mobile development, but in the end or near future, it is to mobile's benefit that applications are platform agnostic and live on the web. There will be circumstances where native development is beneficial, but there will come the time where the facebook app or the cnn app should no longer be relevant. So I'm not sure why in the long term this even matters, the only necessity is that the production is scaled to where they don't lose money. At the same time, I'm probably making this argument more for Ubuntu for phones than anything else.
How long have you been doing web development? These things are cyclical. Back when Flash was FutureSplash, HTML seemed decrepit until eventually it became clear that HTML5 and JavaScript would take over the space. Then just as HTML5 was finished hiding Flash's body, native mobile apps (replete with "web views") started pushing the pendulum in the other direction. Whether we'll see the "mobilization" of the desktop OS or the "webification" of the apps still remains to be seen. Either way, "the cloud" is here to stay.
-- "Maybe it is from me starting into mobile development, but in the end or near future, it is to mobile's benefit that applications are platform agnostic and live on the web."
I don't see this happen, at least not in the nearby future and maybe even never. The point is that people want a native experience and likely the web will never be able to give such an experience. I think webapps will always be something comparable to Java apps a few years ago, i.e. work on every operating system and try to integrate the look & feel, but not 100% "get it".
For our start-up we would like to share a big part of the codebase between platforms though, so this year we'll be looking towards replacing our existing codebase with a Mono (C# / .NET) codebase. At least with this solution we should be able to:
a) give users of our apps a native experience.
b) share a big part of our code between Android & iOS apps.
c) be able to expand easier to Windows Phone if the users of this platform increase and we think it's viable or if there's a demand from our clients to move our platform to Windows Phone.
Disclaimer: I'm a Mac user and I've always hated apps that didn't feel 100% native on my preferred platform. Perhaps to me the experience can be explained as a sort of "uncanny valley": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
There is more than one mobile train. The mobile market has tracks going all over and is still very dynamic. There is a lot of room for disruption and change.
Beyond Android and iOS - Windows 8 mobile, Firefox OS mobile, Ubuntu for phones, Tizen, Sailfish, perhaps even a renewed effort by open WebOS - all of these mobile platform efforts have a chance to reshape the market over the coming years.
Can't argue with the numbers and making no defenses for anything. I've got a Surface RT, I like the hardware, wish the OS didn't show it's windows roots as much.
That's not my point though. While Apple and Samsung are riding high, the mobile world can change quickly. It wasn't that long ago that Nokia was king.
34 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 77.4 ms ] threadWhen it's more like a dilapidated, hodgepodge of bandwagons, each with their own castle walls, all propped up on the rails, sometimes; sometimes using their own temporary locomotion (you know, to make their car go faster than the rest of the train). and it's still being pushed down the tracks, not by the train going anywhere with a destination in mind for the passengers, but by being pushed down the tracks by others latching their bandwagon on the back and needing the extra room. It doesn't matter what the destination is, as long as people get on and pay for tickets.
Once the train is finished (it's never finished), you'll find that it doesn't go anywhere or move it just stretches from coast to coast. To get to your destination, you just move from one car to the next, on foot. As a result, the train pretty much is now just a place for bandits to tear away useful parts and build something that's actually mobile.
The Rails are HTML5, the cars are your platform of choice, and neither is capable of working together for the entire length of track.
This is not correct, iOS's profit share peaked in 2011. At any rate I agree iOS is doing fine.
I disagree with the bigger conclusion about Microsoft. Windows 8/RT/WP 8 literally just launched. Should we have judged the iPhone a failure based on Nokia's dominant profit position less then 6 months after the iPhone launched? That would be silly.
I'm not concluding whether or not they will be successful, just saying that Microsoft may indeed be offering something compelling and new to consumers with tech devices (consistency).
As it stands now, I have two completely separate experiences on my Windows 8 laptop (desktop and metro), whereas I just have one on my Macbook Air that is approaching an iOS experience ever so slightly on each new OS X version. I'm not sure what position is being argued though. It seems like Apple is converging faster than Microsoft.
My girlfriend is working in a SME where they rely on a desktop app essential to their business which only runs on Windows... So they're forced to used Windows. Yet no one there buys Windows phones or tablet: they don't want to hear about it. A person there is perfectly happy buying a MacBook or MacBook Air (despite being forced to work on Windows), a Samsung smartphone "because it's cheaper than an iPhone" and an iPad or an Android tablet. They don't care about having "all iOS" or "all Windows" or "all Android". Nada. Zero. People don't want that. The only thing they do care about is being able to run their webapp from everywhere.
Best sentence heard today? "The company selling us the software (previously Windows-only) we need has now put the application in the cloud and we can use from any browser. We'll at last be able to use our Mac to work and get rid of Windows!".
The webapp revolution is under way and it's changing the way SMEs (the real backbone of the economy btw, representing more money than the corporate world) are using computers. They know they've been stuck in the Windows and Office milking cycle and they don't like it. People in SMEs are starting to realize that there's a way out and Microsoft-shops throughout the world who previously could survive by selling Windows-only software are now forced to move "to the cloud" or become irrelevant. Because the demand from the users is there.
Karma is a bitch. And it's coming right into Microsoft's face.
This assumes the market only wants new and not catch up. On the contrary, I think Android is where it is because Android caught up and delivered an iPhone-esque experience faster and better than competitors.
WP7 was newer and more original but flopped in the market against Android because of the above, among other reasons.
> Only Samsung and Apple are competing in phones
I get a bit sick of this kind of line. Yes, sure, Samsung is on top now in the Android world. Only a short time ago HTC was on top. Now it's changed to Samsung. That's the very definition of competition. Now Google is shipping Nexus 4's via LG and LG can't make enough of them. To say there is no competition is utterly ridiculous.
The really shocking thing is that in the last quarter Microsoft's smart phone market share actually dropped. Even with the assistance of all the pent up demand of people waiting for Windows 8, it still went down. Even if there was no intrinsic market demand for these products I would have expected an initial surge from the faithful just to try out something new.
For most sysadmins, the fact that Windows RT cannot join a domain and cannot be managed with GPOs/SCCM makes it a nonstarter.
It's fairly easy to manage iOS devices with any number of MDM tools.
You mean it's fairly easy to manage a (small but slowly growing) list of privileges that Apple provides and impossible otherwise.
Besides day to day management (patching, A/V, GPOs, etc), what the inability to join a domain means for large companies is that they cannot track what they have in use in any useful way, primarily the useful way that Microsoft cares about when it comes to Enterprise Agreement negotiations. This is a huge bugbear, but one that millions of companies have to deal with triannually.
Not shocking, there were still a lot of old WinMob (like HD1s) out there that hand't been replaced yet.
> Even if there was no intrinsic market demand for these products I would have expected an initial surge from the faithful just to try out something new.
In a universe where even the apple fanboy is a myth, I'm not sure there are any faithful anymore.
I _really_ like C#. But other than limited Mono support, you're forced into using or relying on your users to conform to Microsoft standards.
I'm a MS researcher but I don't speak for Microsoft. That being said, I'm a big fan of SharpDX and MonoGame for my personal projects. They work well enough that I have avoided going native. Ya, I'm still a bit miffed that this isn't supported out of the box, but in practice its easy to work around.
I don't see this happen, at least not in the nearby future and maybe even never. The point is that people want a native experience and likely the web will never be able to give such an experience. I think webapps will always be something comparable to Java apps a few years ago, i.e. work on every operating system and try to integrate the look & feel, but not 100% "get it".
For our start-up we would like to share a big part of the codebase between platforms though, so this year we'll be looking towards replacing our existing codebase with a Mono (C# / .NET) codebase. At least with this solution we should be able to:
a) give users of our apps a native experience.
b) share a big part of our code between Android & iOS apps.
c) be able to expand easier to Windows Phone if the users of this platform increase and we think it's viable or if there's a demand from our clients to move our platform to Windows Phone.
Disclaimer: I'm a Mac user and I've always hated apps that didn't feel 100% native on my preferred platform. Perhaps to me the experience can be explained as a sort of "uncanny valley": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
Beyond Android and iOS - Windows 8 mobile, Firefox OS mobile, Ubuntu for phones, Tizen, Sailfish, perhaps even a renewed effort by open WebOS - all of these mobile platform efforts have a chance to reshape the market over the coming years.
That's not my point though. While Apple and Samsung are riding high, the mobile world can change quickly. It wasn't that long ago that Nokia was king.
There will be more innovation to come.