SuperSite Blog Daily Update: October 6, 2010

From tfa: "In looking at the share of each OS in the total market, Nielsen found that the BlackBerry OS continued to lead with 31% at the end of August, followed by iOS at 28%. However, while the BlackBerry OS has declined in share from 36% in January and iOS has remained steady, Android has climbed from 8% to 19%, Nielsen found."

So "most popular" means most new purchases over a six month timeframe, not overall share of the OS, where Android still lags behind iOS and Blackberry. Bit ambiguous there.

I don't suppose that Paul will ever give it up, but "marketshare" is very poor way to judge a product's place in the market. This

www.asymco.com/.../the-symmetry-of-share-shifts-in-mobile-phones

Is the smartest thing I've seen in a long time about judging the relative positions, and "velocities" of competitive products, "phones" in this case.

Look particularly at the vector graph he shows. Android, and soon Windows Phone are not tied to a particular hardware vendor, so you need the vector sum of all the hardware vendors to see where Android is going as a single entity.

The vector sum does not point in the same direction that Apple's does. He doesn't show the data for all the Android phones, but viability requires that the vector has to point in the first quadrant, ie, increasing profits and increasing marketshare. The slope can vary, but that's where you have to be.

The problem for the hardware phone makers is that they'll find themselves in an even faster race to the bottom than happened with PCs. Whether it is Android or Windows Phone, there will be little to distinguish one hardware model from another save price. Even then, it's a minor issue, because the real cost is the contract.

That's why the Android:iPhone and Windows:Mac analogy doesn't hold up; the cost model is very different.