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| Authored by: kuroshima on Saturday, October 27 2012 @ 09:25 AM EDT |
Disclaimer: I am biased towards Free/Libre Open Source Software, Android, and
Google, in
that order. I also believe in letting people know of my biases.
PJ, when the iPad was introduced, it created a new market. True, there were
tablets and
convertible laptops before that, but they were heavy, cumbersome, had poor
battery life,
ran desktop OSes (mostly from a certain Redmond company) with at most a thin
overlay to
make them slightly more touch friendly, and extremely expensive. Yeah, even
compared to the
iPad, they were extremely expensive. Given that Apple created the market, they
had almost
total dominance over it. This lasted for a while. Android manufacturers then saw
that a
phone OS (iOS) could be serviceable as a tablet OS, given that the use cases are
not that
different (at least until you try to do content creation as opposed to content
consumption.
Now, consumers outnumber creators by at least an order of magnitude, and
probably at least
3 order of magnitude) However, Android was not ready for the tablet form
factor, and only
Chinese craplets and the original Samsung Galaxy Tab (that was a perfectly
serviceable
phone, in order to qualify for the Google Apps that required phone functionality
in devices
- a trick played by Google to avoid Android 2.x being used in tablets) were able
to start
establishing a beachhead in Apple's fief. The results weren't very good. I think
that Job's
declarations on 7" tablets being DOA date from this era.
Then came Android 3.x, rebuilt from the ground up for tablets, but not released
as
Free/Libre Open Source Software. The (official) reasons for this is that Google
had had to
cut corners to get it into the market ASAP, and the code was of dubious quality,
so they
didn't want to show it yet. There were some very nifty tablets, such as the
Motorola Xoom,
the original Galaxy Tab, and the original Asus Transformer, but they didn't make
much of a
dent in the Apple controled market. Google then released Android 4.0, that they
opensourced, to merge back the developments of Android 3.X into the main Android
branch.
Now, even cleaned up, the code ewas a radical departure from the 2.X days, and
OEMs had
great troubles porting their proprietary overlays to this new paradigm. ICS (the
codename
for Android 4.0.x) failed to penetrate into the market, as not only existing
hardware
didn't get updated, but manufacturers still released 2.3.x devices, because they
had
started production way before Android 4.0 was announced, and didn't get updated.
On the
tablet front, it wasn't much better. Then came the Kindle Fire. Amazon took
Android 2.3,
forked it, introduced a big proprietary overlay that meant that only geeks would
recognize
it, and released the Kindle Fire. Amazon sold them in huge quantities, and as
they can
still run Android apps, they greatly enlarged the beachhead created by the
original Galaxy
tab, and the 3.x tablets. Android then became a contender in tablet space (and
Amazon still
accounts for a huge percentage of the Android tablet market, despite not opening
to non-US
markets until very recently - as in Kindle Fire tablets not being available in
Europe until
this week). The OEMs didn't like this new contender, but didn't do anything to
alter the
new status quo, as the market growth Amazon created benefited them indirectly.
Still Google
was not pleased by how things were going, as Amazon's Kindle Fire took advantage
of their
work, and didn't bring back indirect revenue (from adds and content from the
Android
Market/Play Store). They then released the Nexus 7, that seems like it sold like
it was
going out of fashion (non-scientific findings/Hearsay BTW, as there are no
official numbers
that I know of).
This is what had led to the current numbers, where Amazon only has a 60% market
share. The
trend is similar to what happened on the smartphone front, where the iPhone
dwarfed Android
at the beggining, but Android experimented explosive growth, while the iPhone's
market
share went down. Apple saw this, and released the iPhone 5 and the iPad Mini,
both going
against the company's official posture (3.5" is the perfect size for a
smartphone/7"
tablets are Dead On Arrival). Apple has gone from being a followed company, to
being a
follower company, in an effort to stop the market bleed, as it knows, from
experience from
the Mac days, that catering only to their captive market will eventually lead to
their
marginalization and stagnation. I believe that the ship is too big to turn on a
dime, and
that Apple is paying now for some corners they cut in building iOS, with the
most prominent
example being that apps don't scale at all (they need to be recoded to add
support for new
resolutions - so when the "retina" devices came out, old apps appeared
blurry, including
pure vector based interface elements such as text, and with the iPhone 5
changing the
aspect ratio, old apps will appear letterboxed). Android had to deal with these
issues from
day one, meaning that while the road was certainly bumpy, the end result ended
up stronger
(other issues relate to their security model, to the way their kernel handles
multitasking,... things that again Linux and Android had to deal with since day
1). That's
the power of being Open Source, it forces the developers to consider many
additional use
cases that they may never had to, had they lived in a walled garden.
TL:DR version, Apple's market share in both smartphones and tablets is trending
down, and
Android is exploding. Apple is now trying to reverse this by any means
necessary. They are
caught by their bad decisions they enshrined as "the one true way",
and so is fighting a
war on multiple fronts against multiple enemies (including their former allies).
They've
gone reactive, instead of proactive. It may be too soon to really notice, but
unless things
change, I believe this is the beginning of the end for them.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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