Woz: Apple Almost Launched A Phone In 2004, Android Will “Win The Race”
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
But the race that matters is the race in terms of profits, and Apple seems on track to remain the most profitable company, without producing the most common phone:
- they have indecent margins;
- they have a credible strategy to comoditize carriers (cf. their not-so-secret deal with Gemalto);
- they cash in at all stages: on the hardware, on the software, on carrier fees, on the App store;
- a significant part of their R&D effort is shared between iOS devices (not only phones) and OSX.
The flip side of the gamble is that Google makes money of search and ad revenues even if they don't sell an Android. Sure, the users aren't AS likely to use gmail, or picasa web sharing, or what have you, but they likely make some money off of almost every smart phone user, regardless of whether their phone is an Android, iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Mobile.
You might be right, for sure, but I think Google is the long-term winner here.
How can you possibly compare Google's business model with Apple's? Google seeded the world with Android to jumpstart the smartphone revolution faster. That means that more people will see more web ads sooner. For every day that X people view web ads, Google makes money; this is especially true if that day is tomorrow, rather than five years from now, because Google's share of the web ad business is really good now and doesn't seem likely to go up from here. [1] So Google increased the area under the smartphone-users-vs-time curve for the next few years, and will then make money on that.
Google also makes money on Apple's products, of course. If Apple were capable or interested in saturating the near-term market with iPhones, Google wouldn't have needed to bother with Android, and maybe they wouldn't. And, to the extent that Apple does eventually saturate the market with iPhones, Google might slack off on Android. Though that also depends on what happens with iAds.
Meanwhile, Apple primarily sells gadgets. They make money by selling more gadgets or by maintaining high margins, or both.
Their businesses are intertwined, and the actions of one affect the other, but they're not in the same business and you can't run a horse race between them. Companies don't win some prize by having a higher market share, or higher total market cap, or higher total revenue. Zappos isn't a failure just because its $1B revenue is 65 times smaller than Apple's.
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[1] Though who knows? There are other ad businesses in the world than the one Google currently dominates.
Will handset manufacturers win by indenturing themselves to the carriers and with a commodity OS? No.
Apple sells a vertically integrated device where they profit on every level.
Google is working to create and grow a mobile market that just didn't exist. I don't think you can compare the two approaches directly. Google is making sure their primary business profit center has a market while Apple is maintaining a top to bottom ecosystem they can control.
And they are spreading that control style to desktops.
Article states that Woz thinks that current non iphone smartphone hardware is already better than iphones. Once android software catches up, which he predicts will soon, it will have "won" the race. The race of which OS has the most installs.
The MySpace headline you mention was referring to MySpace's effective killing of it's competitors (Friendster, Orkut, etc). So for that period of time, they did "win". But yes, the race never ends, it's a journey not a destination, and so on.
Some day when my kids have kids, they'll have to explain this antiquity called "Facebook" to glassed-over stares. "That's lame mom, I'll be back, I'm going and check my HolodeckFurrySpace.com page"
Problem is: there has for a long time been such an OS on the market: Windows Mobile. It didn't become dominant over time, on the contrary, it is currently in survival mode.
Android is more like Linux. Linux didn't become dominant on the Desktop, but Android (i.e. Linux) will fare better on smartphones because smartphones don't rely on an huge existing base of applications and IT-support departments.
If Woz' argument was true: Why did RIM (and in Europe, Nokia) and other vertical integrators get the lions share[1] of the smartphone market when the "winner" strategy was already present in the market? They did because the rules are different for the smartphone market than the desktop PC market.
[1] http://www.asymco.com/2010/11/03/what-do-you-have-to-believe...
I think his point was that Windows was successful by bringing features made popular by MacOS to a wider market and more diverse hardware, just as Android is doing that with the iPhone concept.
Collaboration on this started in 2004. It's not a smartphone but I wonder if this is what Woz (mis-)remembers.