Nokia is already on the 5th version of Maemo, a platform which by any measure is non-functional but already 5 years in the making. After this investment, only one product is shipping and it's something of a science experiment--a pre-beta product. Nokia is also on the 9th version of Symbian, a functional but outdated platform stuck in the 90s. Promising big things in the 10th version to be re-branded Symbian ^2--I guess double digit version numbers are not confidence inspiring.
Microsoft meanwhile is working hard on the 7th major version of Windows Mobile. World waiting with bated breath.
There is an implied message in Android advocacy that once more licensees join in, volumes will be distributed among a broad set of companies benefiting from a healthy rivalry. This broad licensing will be a boon for volumes and for user choice and the platform itself will prosper.
I'm going to argue here that there will be no healthy distribution of volumes or profits in the Android platform.
History shows that volumes for an openly licensed mobile platform concentrate in the hands of a single vendor. To illustrate, I attached a list of all the devices which shipped (to date) with a flavor of Windows Mobile. The list includes 911 different phone models (search on your own on pdadb.net under the pdamaster tab--search criteria are on the last page of the PDF).
The Windows Mobile platform "took off" and had hundreds of concurrent licensees in the middle of this decade. In spite of this wide adoption, one vendor captured 80% of the volumes for all instances of the platforms: HTC. Having started with the iPaq as a PDA and followed by being the first to market with a WinMo device, HTC dominated Windows Mobile volumes even when faced with literally hundreds of competitors. These competitors included all the big names: from PC vendors like HP, Dell and Toshiba, to cellular incumbents like Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG and every ODM and OEM in between. The reason HTC won is mundane: they have the experience and the distribution to make an impact and they iterate rapidly and are intimate with the details of making a tough-to-integrate product work. They basically worked their way up the value chain from a contract design shop to a branded top tier vendor.
But if you exclude HTC, dividing the number of units of WinMo shipping at any given time by the number of licensed products in the market at that time, one gets about 50,000 units/licensee. Think about that: except for HTC, an average licensee could hope to ship 50k units for any phone they engineer and market. And they also need to prepay Microsoft the minimum license fee of $10/unit (approx) for a minimum order of 50k units or half a million dollars.
This is actually a paradox. Put yourself in the shoes of a business manager at one of the potential licensees. Consider the situation where there are 200 competitors in a market all shipping undifferentiated products, and one competitor has 80% share. Would you want to be the 201st? Saying yes implies hoping to split the remaining 20% 200 ways or obtaining, on average, 0.1% share? But this is not a share of all phones, it's a share of that platform, which itself is, at best 10% of all smartphones which make up maybe 20% of all phones. So you are committing a few million dollars to pursue (.2*.1*.001=) .00002 of a market. That target is 3 orders of magnitude less than what Apple obtained in 2 years (without the margins). It never adds up unless you expect your entry to blow out of the 20% ghetto and take on the incumbents.
As it turned out there were dozens upon dozens of business managers who opted to be the 201st (or 301st). Unsurprisingly, the result was that every Windows Mobile business plan failed (except that of HTC). Every decision to join this ecosystem on the device side was a value destroying decision, repeated 900 times.
Why?
I don't have an answer as to why so many are taken in by this. I have a hypothesis that it has to do with excess R&D capacity (e.g. idle engineers) that compels small companies to build product with no hope of market penetration, but I cannot prove it. They may also couple the low barrier to entry to the premise from the platform vendor that a no-name licensee could be the next Dell/Acer/HTC if the platform "takes off".
Regardless of the cause, the proliferation of WinMo SKUs did nothing for the success of the platform overall. For consumer products, it does not matter what jockeying for position happens within the value chain if the end user/developer experience is painful and uncompetitive.
Android will win or lose on the user/developer experience. It will not win or lose on the proliferation of licensees.
In comparing two platforms like iPhone and Android, the question of addressable market for developers must come first. Apple has the advantage of an early lead plus its iPod touch devices which add another 40% to volumes. As a result, Apple created a 57 million units base with 100% yearly growth. It's not a stretch to assume that before the end of 2010, Apple will have 100 million units in the field with 150 million by 2011.
All told, current Android licensees offered up less than 4 million devices to developers to date. When accounting where future Android volumes will come from, the chances are that Nokia, Samsung and RIM will not deploy Android widely as they have their own platforms to protect. That leaves Motorola, Sony Ericsson, HTC and LG and the current Windows Mobile licensee base. Even assuming unprecedented growth (270% y/y--greater than iPhone ever achieved) from this less-than-stellar list of vendors, it's hard to imagine more than 30 million Android installed base by end of 2011.
One Android device for every five iPhone OS devices does not compel ecosystem switching costs for developers. Fragmentation and low volumes coupled with a tenuous vendor story leads us to conclude that iPhone will still have the upper hand by 2011.
Nice summary: Essentially, Android isn't Google's phone platform, it's an open alternative for failing hardware makers to use in place of Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux to create the same type of convoluted, fractionalized, and poorly integrated products they're already making. This is also why Symbian, Windows Mobile, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson are all failing commercially.
Google's primary and most significant contribution won't be any major innovation in the core Android platform but rather in its own bundled apps, where Google plans to earn its revenues from via, to put it bluntly, adware and spyware.
This prediction says that WinMo and Symbian are out at Samsung. Not a big surprise there.
The real news is some new "proprietary" OS is to take a majority share of the portfolio moving Android out of the picture gradually after 2011.
You will infer from my previous comments that the reason any deep pocketed vendor would shun Android is the same as why they would shun WinMo: no "control" over the whole product and hence no differentiation vis-a-vis an integrated competitor.
The Android devotees would then have to depend on their platform reaching critical mass without Nokia, Samsung, Apple, Palm and RIM, all of which will be shipping integrated products. LG got bought off by Microsoft and they will wallow in the mire.
Where does that leave Android? Moto and SE? They barely make up 10% of all devices and negligible smartphone share today and both are borderline going concerns.
That just leaves HTC, which shipped 80% of all WinMo. My bet is that they will ship 80% of Android, but that still tops them out at 10% share WW.
Looking at the platform game top-down and bottom-up you get the same story.
On April 9th, 2007 Apple announced that the 100 millionth iPod had been sold, making the iPod the fastest selling music player in history. The first iPod was sold five and a half years earlier, in November 2001.
Three months after that 100 millionth iPod, Apple sold the first iPhone.
My prediction is that sometime next year Apple will announce the 100 millionth iPhone OS device sold, making the iPhone the fastest selling platform in history. The iPhone will have been on the market for three years.
As of now there are at least 57 million iPhone/iPod touch devices in the field. This season there are likely to be over 15 million more sold. The bar to clear is therefore 28 million next year which seems achievable by Q3.
It goes without saying that 100 million contiguously addressable devices makes it the largest such device platform, but it may make it so by an order of magnitude.
The question of Android viability goes deeper than the app ecosystem. In fact the ecosystem is itself dependent on the network effect of the platform. That effect is weak because the platform is not "tight" and is prone to fragmentation and its value cannot be communicated to end users. That is due to the lack of integration and consistency of purpose.
Bottom line, the problem with Android was always that it was a reaction to Windows Mobile. It was symmetric in its approach to the market with the added value of being free. In that sense it's very successful. It might even gain all the share that WinMo used to have (about 14% of smartphones at its peak). But it will never rise above the nicheness of WinMo.
I'm always amazed at the technocrati babbling classes' inability to spot causes. They go on and on about execution and never understand that execution is a resource not a strategy. Resources are fungible.
I for one do not "hope that Android succeeds". It's a foregone conclusion that it will not. It's not a matter of hoping.
When thinking about the number of devices shipping out of Apple, and the relative value of those units compared to the competition you have to always think of the platform.
The market leader Nokia claimed to have sold 16+ million smartphones in the quarter. When comparing platforms, to whatever Apple ships in iPhones you have to add the iPod touch units. I see that number being about half of the iPhone numbers or about 4 million. Let's say 10 to 12 million as a range for the platform. Already this is within striking range of Nokia.
It may sound that Apple has some catching up to do, however the important thing is that most of the Nokia devices are not uniformly addressable by developers because they are different platforms and the Symbian platform itself will be broken next year as it has been broken many times before. This is also true for Blackberry and Windows Mobile and will become true for Android as vendors fork and splinter the code to differentiate.
This already puts Apple in the pole position today in terms of contiguous addressable units volumes.
I cannot over-emphasize the importance of this platform effect. It's what made Windows dominant and it should be the most important issue in the planning of new mobile products, but it clearly isn't for Apple's competitors. Either product planners are ignorant of history or completely hamstrung by other constraints on their businesses (I expect the latter).
As a result it's inevitable that Apple will have a dominant platform. The numbers in apps and consumption of apps already are telling this story, and devs are voting with their code in a landslide. But going into 2010, this will become evident in the units and Apple share numbers will accelerate toward lead position.
The bogie therefore is to look for contiguously addressable installed base. On this basis of competition, I expect at least 100 million for Apple at the end of next year and less than 10 million for any competitor. At that point the game will be officially over.
When the iPhone was announced in January 2007 I tried to envision the competitive response from Nokia. The method involved some knowledge of the product development cycle that I was faintly aware of.
Here is what I predicted:
2007.There would be no response within the first year, meaning there would be no perceived threat of any kind. No process change, No roadmap changes and no business review. Apple is not considered a competitor.
2008.There would be plans made to respond with press releases, dismissing the challenge as a non-threatening "positive" for the industry. No process changes, no product plan changes, no business model changes. Apple would not be considered a competitor except in "high end multimedia" (invisible in any of the segments Nokia uses to define markets).
2009.In the third year, product development teams would be asked to begin roadmapping some of the hardware features that would keep Nokia ostensibly competitive (unfortunately for Nokia, hardware is not what sells iPhones). Results from these efforts would emerge in 18 to 24 months. Apple not considered a competitor except in "high end converged devices" (i.e. a few consumer segments/categories are considered vulnerable).
2010.Realization that iPhone is a threat from new dimensions (user experience). Planning begins on reshaping the software base as a market-driven (not technology-driven) asset (5 year cycle). Apple begins to be evaluated as a competitor in devices and services, although still not compliant with current market definitions.
2011.The realization that the iPhone competes as a platform. Planning begins on repositioning Symbian/Ovi. Products planned in 2009 begin shipping--this means first capacitive touch screens but crude, almost unusable software.
2012.The realization that the iPhone is an integrated product and that integration is a key to competitiveness enters management consciousness. Planning begins on organizational change and a realignment of incentives to account for this new threat. Crude shuffling of internal assets and management musical chairs begins. Organizational change amounts to mostly new names for old departments. Touch screen phones with slightly better software begin shipping (similar in feel to Blackberry Storm from 2008). Incentives are added for employees (in across-the-board performance objectives) to hit user experience targets.
2013.Management begins planning a new organization structure that takes into consideration the fundamental causes of iPhone's success: integration, software, user experience over the objections of sales and markets org that depends on shipping plastic to distributor. Another reorganization that is slightly more rational and aligned with the market is initiated. The plan is to have the assets in place by 2019 to compete effectively as a platform.
2014.First products that are roughly comparable with iPhone version 1 begin shipping. The required software redesign started in 2010 is coupled with the integration efforts. Nokia's response to the iPhone has begun.
I tried to revisit the prediction to update it with anecdotal evidence but so far there has been little activity that has affected the trajectory.
Note 1: Whether an iPhone v1.0 shipping in 2014 would be competitive is left as an exercise to the reader.
Note 2: The N97 shipping in 2009 is the result of work begun in 2007, it has had no influence at all from the iPhone.
Note 3: The Microsoft response cycle is slightly shorter (perhaps 5 years vs. 7) but they lose a year in efforts to integrate with licensees. As neither MSFT nor GOOG are able to integrate products, they will never be able to actually deliver a competitive product. In this regard, Nokia has an advantage.
Note 4: The key takeaway from this analysis is that the industry standard product cycle for an integrated, platform based product is 5 to 8 years and if one competitor can achieve a 2 to 3 year cycle, then the more nimble competitor can "turn inside" the industry and, within two cycles, dominate it. Although smaller competitors are able to turn product faster, they are usually unable to sustain the platform heavy lifting (which takes an order of magnitude more effort/assets).
