John Gruber's Post-I/O Thoughts
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
According to http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-iphone-smartphone-market... in the first quarter of 2010 Apple had 16.1% of smartphones and smartphones were 18.8% of mobile phones. That comes out to almost exactly 3%.
Ballmer also wasn't wrong about Windows Mobile. The "60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent" was not a prediction, it was just what he would prefer.
It was and is obvious that at some point all phones will be what we call smartphones now. I think Ballmer's point is that even when that happens, the iPhone will not be able to sustain its 16%. It will still have insignificant market share.
Android will not, though. It might get "60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent", and that's the share that Ballmer would have preferred run Windows.
So yes, I think Ballmer asked the right question and got the right answer. He just doesn't have any way to respond to Android.
Of course he does: he can give away the new smartphone OS. It's not as if Microsoft has never given away software to win market share.
Microsoft cannot just take that market, but they can, and in time, probably will fight for it.
There's constraints of display/keyboard size, and the form-factor encourgaes different usages (eg. less business software).
But I think people might start to dock their smartphones to large displays and keyboards at home (that's what I do with my netbook) - like a portable harddrive. Projectors might also become popular, giving a large portable display.
Or, future desktops might actually be smartphone components, wrapped in a desktop package (in the way microcomputers invaded the workstation, minicomputer and mainframe markets).
> But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.
He was exactly right about Apple's position but there's no obvious way Microsoft will be able gain mass adoption. Google will.
Apple has a tiny sliver of the total phone market and
that's what he meant
Now they've tossed the whole thing out and started over with a product that won't be out for another 6 months and in terms of features seems to be equivalent to a first generation iPhone (which is relevant because I really don't think Microsoft is going to create a better user experience so they'd have to compete on features)
It's really kind of sad.
Unless Windows Mobile is a vastly superior product to Android (and how likely is that?), it'll be left out of the smartphone market unless they can give it away and try to make it up in Bing search revenue.
Blackberry can provide a lot of those features, but not all.
And iPhone has very good activesync support.
As someone who runs an enterprise's It dept. I'm not sure I can see Enterprise features that Microsoft could compete on (Security, Exchange Support and Remote Wipe are my real concerns and all seem to be covered by Froyo)
Worked for Xbox.
I'm not sure they can.
This market is much more complex, with a faster-moving platform, more hardware innovation, and competition (Apple, Nokia, RIM and Google) that can't be bullied or out-spent.
Of course, this is all predicated on WPS7 meeting expectations, the pretty UI actually being usable, etc. Otherwise, Android. So I guess the point is that, at least in my case, Microsoft is still in the game, but they have only one chance to deliver.
Its very different than any mobile ui out there. I really enjoy the experience on my zune hd and that's a preview of what wm 7 will be based around. From what I've experienced (people who have never seen this type of ui before), people seem to be intrigued and curious by it. If the mobile team at microsoft is paying attention to details in the way the zune team did leading up to the launch of the zune hd, then a lot of doubts people have about this platform will be gone.
USB syncing is sooo 20th Century
I'm thinking post that though, walking into my network and syncing latest updates, even without my prompting
Carriers here like to complain that people are downloading too much rather than just upgrading the infrastructure to deal with it. I shudder to think what would happen if people started downloading over the air on a serious scale, it's already pretty bad with normal web surfing.
I had some thoughts on it recently: http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2010/04/imagine-a-wireless-sync-w...
I would love to see iPhones and iPads show up in the same way and not require a sync immediately. This would be right on track with the life-without-wires they were pushing with the MacBook Air.
With the iPhone and iPad doing as well as they are, I imagine conversations are being had at Apple about what the future of the Mac really is. Even if it has much of a future at all.
Apple are building a new data centre which apparently will be built for the cloud, my guess it's going to be the backbone of iTunes.com and their other online services. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/apple-cloud/
I installed it a couple of days ago and it works like a charm. I also setup 'Activator' so I can launch the wifisync app by pressing the lock button for about a second and it will automatically sync to my Mac.
He's right. Based on price, there is no equivalent.
On features, the equivalent is a Google Nexus One without a SIM card.
Trouble is, that's about to not be available from Google directly. I'm wondering whether we'll be able to buy an N1 without a contract ever again.
Disclosure: I bought an N1 directly from Google and loved the experience of not having to talk to a carrier or any staff member at a generic retail outlet.
Although people who buy iTouches love all the apps and the ability to browse the web whenever they have WiFi, in the end, they're buying an mp3 player. They're buying it so that they can listen to music.
Not only is the N1 much more expensive, but it also has a much worse music-playing interface. Until someone fixes the Android music player or writes their own (luckily, an app can have all the privileges that the core apps have, so anyone could just write the Awesome Music Player app and put it in the market), the demand for a good Android iTouch competitor won't be there.
But I do think that getting an iTouch-like Android device out there is important. There are only so many people who are willing to pay $30/month for Internet on their phone, but pretty much everyone is willing to pay $200-$300 for a nice mp3 player with no recurring cost. And it's important to get as many Android devices out there as possible so that consumers believe that it's a good option (in many people's minds, popular == good) and app developers see more incentive to write good apps.
I'm not sure you're correct. I have a simless old iPhone, equivalent to an iPod Touch, and it runs apps exclusively. It has barely been used for playing music.
In fact, the beauty of apps means the hardwares purpose is completely malleable. In my case, it is primarily a mini-Bloomberg reader and alarm clock.
My sister also has an iPhone, but she's not really tech savvy enough to download apps and actually use them. She's downloaded a few apps, but most of the time she just uses her iPhone as .... a phone.
Although people who buy iTouches love all the apps and the ability to browse the web whenever they have WiFi, in the end, they're buying an mp3 player. They're buying it so that they can listen to music.
The touch music player interface is good, but not as good as my old 40GB iPod Video. Man, it has been almost two years now and I still miss the clickwheel.
I got my iPod touch because of the large screen, the wi-fi and the apps. I don't even hear as much music as I've used to because I really hate unblocking the screen to skip songs and change volume.
Clickwheel, I miss you.
Our family has three iPod touches with no music on ANY of them. If you speak to families with young children, you'll find there are millions of iPod Touches out there being used as game/app/video platforms.
I really want someone to fix this. Android needs a WinAmp type thing to play and catalogue any music.
The built-in player I've abandoned as it doesn't support FLAC.
I'm using andless ( http://code.google.com/p/andless/ ) which supports FLAC and is probably the cleanest interface. But it lacks a bit of polish (smooth transitions between screens, a tactile feel).
It also lacks album artwork read from meta-data and stuff like that. And it stutters occasionally on playback.
I really don't know about music file formats but just because I want a decent music player once I have some time I'm going to see if I can find any open source libraries elsewhere that I can plug in to see whether I can figure out how to fill these shortcomings.
Justin Frankel if you're reading this... we all know you could do this in a week or two and improve our lives in the same way WinAmp originally transformed the music experience on Windows.
[edit]OK, So I just realised I should do something about this, so I've just asked JF if he'd consider it: http://www.askjf.com/index.php?q=662s and I'm going to grab the Android SDK and work out just how inept I am at this. I guess the andless code is a good place to start.[/edit]
Also, the vast majority of people have their music in iTunes. The fact that they can't just plug in the device and tell iTunes to sync might be a turnoff
Also, will iPhone OS 4 be available for iPod Touch? I rather doubt it?
I'm not sure why you would have doubted it. How would it have made sense for Apple to exclude it from the new software release?
Why does Apple exclude the old iPhones?
iPods are released yearly so there is no reason why they shouldn’t be just as fast and have just as much RAM as iPhones. It’s right, though, that the oldest iPod touch (from 2007) won’t get the update. 2nd and 3rd generation iPod touches will but 2nd generation iPod touches won’t get multitasking (just like their brother, the 2nd generation iPhone aka iPhone 3G).
Would be interested in sales numbers of iPods since the iPhone emerged.
Granted, I bought one, but only as a development device because the iPhone is too expensive.
Eventually, phones will be good enough to replace them 100%
I plug my Sansa into my car stereo, and can skip or pause songs without taking my eyes off the road.
With a glass screen and virtual buttons it becomes much harder.
Plus, I like have good, inexpensive, dedicated devices.
Although if you were to only carry around one device it would be a phone, just personally everywhere I go that I would usually want a mp3 player I carry a bag making carrying two devices a non issue.
There's a huge effort to make Qt into a higher level framework that can be used like Cocoa Touch or the Android UI elements. The Qt Declarative/Quick stuff is being advanced as quickly as they can work, but after working with the latest stuff they have a ways to go.
I have a hunch Nokia thinks they'll be able to quickly catch up.
I regret it every day. Stupid E71.
I also dislike how Nokia basically left the phone (or the OS) unsupported and they are now targeting the big-screen iPhone-clones. Nice move there.
I suppose it's no need to tell you how broken their Ovi "market" app is...
How many apps will actually support this feature? It doesn't sound like it's an OS level feature transparent to third party apps. Am I going to have to keep track of which apps support it and which don't?
Gruber doesn't seem to get that Android is cloud based: buy a new Android phone, sign in, and your contacts, apps and bookmarks are available immediately, no finding a PC to tether to.
Music and (for some odd reason) text messages are currently excluded though.
I was blown away when I first got an N1 (my first android) and signed in on startup and immediately had my contacts, email, calendar, etc wired up.
No computer required. No special software required. It just works.
What Google are doing now is taking that further and making that include data like music, pictures, TXT messages, etc. So now when you replace your android that stuff automatically comes across.
What would be lovely is that instead of just sync, whether we could manage the older devices. i.e: Get a new mobile, sync it, declare the old mobile to be wiped and have the old mobile hear that and purge itself.
This helps on the security side, as you could remotely wipe a stolen device. But it also helps with re-selling used phones safe in the knowledge that your data is intact and you're not leaving any on the device.
I think it's the next obvious gap filler in the cloud-owning-the-data space. We can move and sync, now clean up behind us.
Well, that and the fact that if data is persisted across all devices that you eventually will exceed the storage capacity of the device itself. But I'm guessing that network speed will keep pace with this and by the time we're at that crunch point Google will be able to serve that stuff on-demand and just use the phone as a local cache rather than as the persistent storage itself.
I also think he _seriously_ underestimates Microsoft.
What would be interesting would be if they got an entire new board + CEO, Steve Ballmer isn't ready to lead and never will be.
I wonder where they'd be if they'd have been broken up by the US government a decade ago.
Now, all those things have happened or are happening. Want to get on board with cloud hosting in any way? The standard options involve Linux VM images. Languages like Ruby and Python are mainstream and well-supported. Android is disrupting the smartphone market, and has the kind of widespread commercial backing I never would have thought possible for an open, Linux-based thing. Microsoft is no longer an unstoppable leviathan; they've stopped being scary.
Occasionally I'll reflect on all this and chortle happily. I wasn't optimistic enough back in the early 2000s, and that's surprising.
So, I too find it quite humorous that Linux is poised to be a, if not the major player in the next generation of computing - the portable/dedicated devices. But what I find more amusing is that it hasn't been the success of Linux on the desktop that has made this possible, it has been the decline in the importance of the desktop.
So, 2010 may finally be the year of Linux, but it still won't be the year of Linux on the desktop. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Linux came a little bit too late to make inroads on the desktop vs. the incumbent DOS/Windows platform of the early 90's - if it, and the GNU tools, had reached the 1991 level of development in the mid-80s when the PC clones first took hold, that story might have been a different one - but in the real world, it still devastated the competition on servers when the Web started its massive post-1994 growth.
Now we're hitting the juncture where, again, a new platform category is poised for growth; recall how netbooks started as Linux boxes, and only ended up running Windows after a combination of effort(Win7), strongarming(subsidies and licensing agreements), and initial advantages(the desktop ecosystem, which is largely netbook-compatible) from Microsoft. This time around, those tactics can't work.
It might actually work out that the desktop still shifts towards Linux in the end; the "bottom-up" nature of progress in tech means that people are going to want a desktop that does everything their mobile environment does (plus desktop things). Hence, desktops will start running Android or a compatible variant...which would naturally work out to mean you'd be running Linux, even if it isn't today's Linux environments.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/18/microsoft-sues-salesforce-c...
So no, Apple doesn't need to (and won't) reconsider their position on Flash.
It's worst situation for Apple.
Also, people can make flash apps in the browser and that's fine. It wouldn't hurt AppStore sales, cause native apps would be better.
Flash could (and probably would) hurt AppStore sales. It probably wouldn't be significant but some developers would choose to use or keep using Flash rather than creating a native App.
Meaning that now, not only can spyware pop up porn on my parents' home computer, it can also push porn to my kid sister's cell phone? Ditto for apps... I imagine spyware is a thing of the past for most Googlers, but it certainly isn't for the majority of users.
You shouldn't need a desktop (with an OS that runs iTunes) in the first place. I read that the first thing you need to do with iPad is to connect it to iTunes.
That said, the cloud-based syncing that Android will eventually ship looks like the "right" solution. I doubt anyone at Apple considers USB syncing to be the end game, though; I'd be shocked if they didn't have some sort of over-the-air syncing in the pipeline. The question in my mind is will they fix this in 2010 or will they fix this a few years from now. People won't want to stay tethered that much longer.
As a sidenote- syncing over USB makes sense for the iPhone, in some respects, but the iPad lends itself to be a standalone computer. Tying that to another centralized hub is a hassle, and that's where an Android-esque cloud sync would be great.
My G1 upgraded from 1.0 > 1.1 > 1.5 > 1.6 without wiping.
My Droid upgraded from 2.0 > 2.1 (and will > 2.2 soon) without wiping.