[clug] Android in the Business Press

[steve jenkin]

A post about Open Source (!) - as viewed by Alan Kohler, the battle
between Apple iPhone and Google Android from a Business perspective.
[And publishing/advertising]

<http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/The-Android-invasion-pd20100513-5DT55?OpenDocument>

COMMENTARY

Published 7:52 AM, 13 May 2010
Last update 9:59 AM,  13 May 2010

Alan Kohler

Attack of the Androids
----------------------

Publishers who are hoping Apple’s consumer-pays system supplants
Google’s “everything is free” model had a nasty setback this week:
Google’s Android operating system for mobile smartphones passed Apple’s
iPhone in US market share.

According to market research house, NPD, Android now has 28 per cent of
the smartphone operating system market versus Apple’s 21 per cent.
They’re both still lagging Blackberry’s 36 per cent, but gaining rapidly.

<http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/UPDATE-2-HTC-files-to-ban-US-iPhone-iPad-iPod-sale-5DS58?OpenDocument&src=hp11>

The battle between Android and the iPhone is a replica of the one
between Apple and Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s that Microsoft
decisively won, first with MS DOS, the system that loosened IBM’s hold
on PCs and then its earth-changing series of Windows user interfaces,
starting with Windows 1.01 in 1985 and culminating in the launch of
Windows 7 last year.

Once again Apple has achieved early success with its design-based system
of locked hardware and software and is now battling an open platform
competitor – first it was Microsoft, this time Google.

But in 2010, the game is different. <snip>

Apple’s wonderful iTunes payment system, combined with iPhones and
iPads, has looked like the answer: an integrated way of serving and
charging for online content, both for subscriptions and one-off
micropayments.

That will be under serious question if Google successfully swamps the
mobile content business, as it did browsers on PCs.

Of course the publishers only have themselves to blame for the pickle
they are in.

They were seduced by the incredible audience numbers being generated by
the combination of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer,<snip>

The numbers were so large compared to the sales figures they were used
to that it seemed inconceivable that they wouldn’t make money. <snip>

In 2001 Steve Job’s Apple went in what looked like a different
direction, launching the iPod music player, one of the most beautiful
consumer devices ever invented.

In 2007, as Microsoft was being picked off and weakened by open source
software, Jobs launched his attack on the flanks of Google with the
launch of the iPhone, although it didn’t look like it at the time.

But it soon became clear that the combination of iPhone applications,
mobile convenience and the iTunes payments system, was actually an
attack on Google via mobiles.

<snip>
Publishers have been hugely excited by all this, spending a fortune on
developing apps for both the iPhone and the iPad and dreaming of the day
when they’ll be able to start charging again.

But now Google is marching into mobility as well, passing Apple with its
openly available Android operating system for smartphones.

At the same time, the number of mobile friendly websites is expanding
rapidly. According to data from Taptu, a mobile search firm, there are
now 440,100 touch-friendly websites – that is, websites that are
designed to be accessed via a smartphone touch screen.

That’s an annualised growth rate of 232 per cent, and compares well with
the 185,000 apps on the iPhone.

The growth is being driven by the explosion of touch screen phones
modelled on the iPhone – a bit like the IBM clones that swamped the PC
market leader in the 1980s, supported by Microsoft and, later, Intel
microprocessors.

History never repeats, Mark Twain once said, but it often rhymes.
--