Steve Wozniak: Android will be the dominant smartphone platform

Nice phrase. There's something that will help to it and to Android gaining market share: in a few years, smartphones will cost one fifth of its current price. This will have all sorts of implications. Telcos will lose the power subsidizing phones gives them now. Margins for OS will shrink, etc.

Absolutely - they're clearly more interested in profitability and not having to kow-tow to partners than market share. And who can blame them - would you rather be Porsche or General Motors?

Market share is massively over-rated as a metric - someone in the circulation dept of a major newspaper group once told me that when companies start talking about market share, they're usually trying to hide the real story, such as lack of or decline in customers/revenues/profits. Obviously smartphones are a completely different industry, but there are multiple ways to measure business performance, and the ones which are most loudly trumpeted aren't necessarily the most important ones.

I understand the sentiment here, but I don't think it's true. There was a recent quote from El Jobso (can't find off hand, sorry) saying that Apple actually sat on the top end of the market with the Mac (in his absence), got greedy, failed to innovate, and suffered.

Instead, look at what they did with the iPod. They didn't just remain as a high-end mp3 player, they developed products which covered nearly the spectrum of the marketplace, while still remaining the high-end brand.

I think past will be prologue, but it should be the iPod, not the Mac, that will be the best example. That said, when you're taking 50% of the profit in the market with just a 4% share, there's not a lot of reason to be particularly unhappy with your current position!

No offense, but this is probably the most banal argument imaginable.

"There is a myth, more of a meme actually, about the 'inevitability' of commoditization. It is a view of the world that sees things linearly, in terms of singularities, and the so-called "one right path."

In this realm, where commoditization is God, horizontal orientation (versus vertical integration) rules the roost. How else to define consumers, not in flesh and blood terms, not as spirits that aspire to specific outcomes, but rather, as a composite set of loosely-coupled attributes.

This mindset is compelling because it is simple and familiar, but it also leads to blind obsequiousness.

Historical edifices are held as indelible fact. "It's Microsoft v. Apple all over again." "There has to be one absolute, dominant leader." "Open will always prevail -- and should prevail -- over proprietary systems." "Market share matters above all else. Even profits."

There is one small fly in the ointment to this ethos, however, and its name is Apple."

Later:

"The following inconvenient facts must be an affront to the horizontal, commoditized, open, market share zealots. Apple has launched three major new product lines since 2001: the iPod (October, 2001); the iPhone (July, 2007); and the iPad (April, 2010).

The company’s stock is up 3,000 percent since the launch of iPod, 125 percent since the launch of iPhone, and 20 percent since the launch of iPad.

In that same time period, the major devotees of the loosely coupled model — Microsoft, Google, Intel and Dell — have been, at best, outpaced by Apple 6X (in the case of Google dating back to the launch of iPod) and at worst, either been wiped out (in the case of Dell) or treaded water (in the cases of Microsoft and Intel) in every comparison period."

From: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/09/apple-segmentation-strategy...

I don't really understand what the argument is here. A year ago we could have tried to guess whether Android would have taken off or not, but the fact is that Android-based phones are already massively outselling iPhones and BlackBerrys and nothing Apple or RIM have up their sleeves is likely to change that.

The reason is very simple - Apple offers a one-size-fits-all solution and one size doesn't fit all. I like large-screen phones, but Steve jobs says 3.5 is large enough. Do I force myself to like what Jobs likes, or just go and buy something I like? Examples like this are endless: Don't like iTunes? Don't like the boring icon-grid screen on the iphone? Annoyed by pop-up notifications? Think Swype is better the a conventional keyboard? Well it doesn't matter. It's Apple's way or the highway, and a lot of people are taking the highway.

HTC sent me a free Tattoo last year - 2.8" resistive screen, 340x240 resolution, slow processor etc. Any iPhone user (including myself - I kept on using my 1st gen iphone) would have snubbed this crummy phone, except there's hundreds of millions of people in the rest of the world who'll have phones like this as their first smartphone.

That doesn't make his prediction on the iPhone any less valuable.

You don't have to be a fantastic movie maker to be a good movie critic.

The thing that's going to kill iPhone/iPad at the moment IMHO is lack of flash support more than anything else.

Anyway, I trust Woz's guess more than any "market prediction expert".

The story isn't that Netflix isn't on Android because of fragmentation. The story us that Netflix will cause fragmentation on Android phones.

XBox 360, Wii, PS3 and iPhone all have strong DRM build into the platform.

Android doesn't have strong DRM in the base version, so Netflix will (or can) not support that version.

However, individual Android phones may have Netflix because Android is Open Source, so individual manufacturers may add strong DRM to the platform.

Hence, the user experience will likely become (further) fragmented because of Netflix.

No it's not. Netflix doesn't support my computer, so I can't get it. I wish I could...in fact, I'd probably pay 10x the price they're charging for the service they offer. But since they don't support Ubuntu because of DRM issues, there is no Netflix on my computer.

Your Netflix example isn't appropriate here.

The main issue is that Android (or any Linux) is open, so if DRM crackers could modify Windows without looking at the source, imagine how easy will it be having all the source of all the DRM lib surroundings(you could fake the DRM lib with millions of combinations).

This means anybody being able to crack Netflix without effort in seconds and Netflix loosing millions of dollars. Not going to happen.

Most phones in the US have 1 or 2 year contracts with ETFs. Outside the US, the unsubsidized phone price is quite expensive, rougly to $500-$600 USD.

What I'm saying is your comparison doesn't really apply. It's actually even worse than the "Apple vs. Microsoft 2.0" or "Open vs. Closed" debates.

This is true due to cost, not carriers. The iPhone is available on most (all?) carriers in Canada. In fact, the USA is, I think, the only place in the world that has the carrier problem with iPhone. And since the USA is only ~5% of the world's population, that particular problem isn't very significant in the grand scheme of things.

More people are able to get Android phones than iPhones because there are price variations in the Android ones that allow people with little money to buy an Android phone.

A year ago I decided to embrace Android (as a user and as a developer), a principal reason being that it was obvious that the inertia that was going to grow behind it would be huge: The iPhone was so enormously successfully against a litany of foes, that it was obvious that those foes would have to converge on some sort of counter-attack, and Android was there at the right time and place, with the right openness, ability for customization and differentiation, and technology stack.

So I paid attention to the arguments that took place. To say they were completely the opposite of what you and others are now saying is not exaggerating.

Android was doomed, we were told, for any of countless reasons. The iPhone was secure in its pending world domination.

Now of course the argument has changed, over the past quarter absolutely doing a 180. Now it's just all so obvious, right, with so many makers and so many models and so many options against just one itsy bitsy little phone (you know....like Symbian and J2ME, or even the Blackberry, but...well...ignore those because they don't fit the narrative).

The new argument you're supposed to embrace is the "iPhone is for the elite, while Android is for the poor, what with their two for one discounts and low-end phones", while filling out and eagerly consuming self-selecting surveys that comfort that ridiculous notion.