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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

There we go again. Market share. Author did not even bother to consider, at whose expense Samsung and HTC are gaining said share. Apple did grow too. Now 47% of their revenue comes from the product which was launched into the market where Apple had zero marked share and was laughed at for even trying. Another 21% comes from product which did not even exist 1.5 years ago.

Author did forget to include these graphs: http://www.intomobile.com/2011/05/02/apple-has-50-profit-sha...

Yep, Apple should be afraid very afraid.

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Um, no. He pointed out that as the smartphone market grows (at the expense of feature phones, probably), HTC and Samsung are riding that wave much better. It's not horribly surprising, since Apple's product is not likely to be immediately affordable to many of those switching from feature phones, but as the smartphone (and eventually tablet) market becomes commoditized it is not a given that Apple will be able to successfully uphold their profit margin by charging relatively high premiums for their value proposition. Of course they might do just that, but that is not something we can take for granted.

From the article, HTC's market share growth in the given interval was 4%, compared to Apple's 3%. Considering they achieved that growth on significantly lower margins than Apple (and consequently much less revenue growth), I don't think it's reasonable to claim HTC are riding the smartphone market growth much better than Apple.

Samsungs 10% growth is more impressive, but again was achieved with much lower margins. Apple could afford to cut their margin significantly if competitive pressure forces their hand, and unlike RIM they have a product which is high demand.

Percent is not the same as percentage points, you know. Growing from 6% to 10% is actually a growth of 66% percent, which sounds much more impressive. Fair point about the margins, but the fact is that Apple's entire business model is built on ensuring their margin stays high by charging large premiums for products that are clearly better than the competition. This is not guaranteed to last forever. The other companies on the other hand are used to living in commoditized markets with razor thin margins. I'm not saying Apple are doomed, but they clearly cannot just write the whole competition off, and they obviously aren't.

Sure, but by a similar logic going from 0.1 to 0.2% represents 100% growth.

But yes, I agree that Apple are very aware of the competition and the pitfalls of potentially losing marketshare. It would be silly for them to be otherwise. I just don't thing they're running scared yet in the way the original article infers they are.

There we go again. Market share. Author did not even bother to consider, at whose expense Samsung and HTC are gaining said share. Apple did grow too.

Fair point, but Apple's growth is clearly in a decline compared to earlier years.

And once the established smartphone market stabilizes at something with Android clearly in the lead (like 80% Android and 20% iOS) which platform do you think will get the attention of developers? Which platform do you think will get the apps first? Which platform do you think will get the exclusive apps?

If (and I say if) the divide gets big enough for these kinds of mechanisms to trigger and start playing in, iOS as a platform will slowly but surely lose users, and have the process reinforce itself until the platform wither off and dies.

So in that regard, while market share isn't everything, it is still important for lots of other strategic concerns which most certainly are.

> And once the established smartphone market stabilizes at something with Android clearly in the lead (like 80% Android and 20% iOS) which platform do you think will get the attention of developers? Which platform do you think will get the apps first? Which platform do you think will get the exclusive apps?

Having just built an iPhone and Android app, it won't be 80/20. It'll be 20/15/25/20/20. Our iPhone app works essentially the same way on all iPhones/iPod touches. Our Android app was a horrendous bear to test - lots of "on one device it does this, on another device it breaks" from our testers.

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