Daily Archives: August 17, 2012

Android is winning – if you’re writing apps for China. Elsewhere, though…

android

If Android is winning (to quote Techcrunch, which managed to read the Gartner release on smartphone share and see the big 68% for the share of Android phones shipped), then howcome American developers still aren’t battering down the doors to develop for it? Why aren’t they all launching on Android first?

To quote the Techcrunch article,

There is no denying Android’s dominance anymore. There is no way even the most rabid Apple fanboy can deny that iOS is in second place now. Android is winning… Developers cannot ignore Android. The old mantra of releasing on iOS and then eventually hitting Android needs to be rethought… Android the ecosystem still sucks, but Android the mobile platform is winning.

To which the simple answer is that those US developers would certainly be rethinking it if Android were really running away with the smartphone business in their own backyard. But it’s not quite that simple. Why? Because Gartner’s headline figure is for worldwide share. In the US – where many of those developers are – different measures pertain. And in Europe, where many more developers are, different measures pertain again.

What those differences add up to is a world where while it’s absolutely true that Android is the best-selling mobile platform, for US and European mobile developers – in fact for any who aren’t developing specifically for China – the whole topic is more nuanced.

Let’s revisit the Gartner numbers: those said that Android had a 64.1% market share worldwide, and Apple’s iOS 18.8%. Other platforms – Symbian, RIM’s BBOS, Windows Phone – were all under 10%, and totalled 17.1% (that is, less together than iOS). Android is winning, right?

The China syndrome

But the world is not a level playing field, and it’s not split up into evenly-sized areas. Digging a bit deeper into those Gartner numbers (as I was able to do), you learn that China is the world’s largest market, and that it’s there where Android really stakes its claim. Of the 153.7m smartphones shipped in the quarter, 39m (that’s 25% of the total) went to China, and of those 31.2m (80%) were running Android. Apple managed just 4.7m (12%). Everyone else? Just 3.1m. Slim pickings.

Which is great – bringing the internet to people in rural China must be a good thing – but means that the story for Android, the iPhone and other platforms in the rest of the world is rather different.

The US, the world’s second-largest smartphone market, took 23m devices (15% of the world total): there, Android was 58% (13.3m) and the iPhone was 36% (8.3m). Everyone else? Just 1.38m, which is astonishingly slim pickings in terms of new phone sales. Yet it fits with what we’ve seen over Nokia’s Lumia sales, which were reckoned to measure in the hundreds of thousands in the US, despite an encouraging launch.

Here’s how the picture looks if we split the world into three territories – China, the US, and everywhere else – and show the averages from the Gartner figures. Suddenly it’s clear that Android is over-represented in China, and that it distorts the average. If you’re a smartphone developer in China, then you’ll want to be on Android. But you already knew that.

Android shares by region 2Q 2012 Android, iOS and other smartphone platforms’ share by region: US, China, rest of world, 2Q 2012. Source: Gartner

Yet even that doesn’t tell the full story. "Market share" reflects sales, not installed base – and some (many?) smartphone sales are upgrades. What we really want to know is the installed base for each platform; if in the US all of those iPhone sales are going to existing customers, but all the Android sales are going to new customers, then that’s significant – for developers, the new customers represent potential growth in sales, whereas someone who already has an iPhone and just gets another one won’t have to re-download all their apps. (Of course then you run into the question of whether they give their old iPhone to someone who didn’t have one before, who sets up a new account, and then does download new apps. But this is why we’re looking at installed base.)

US smartphone installed base by platform US installed base by platform. Source: ComScore, interpreted by The Guardian

It turns out that the only set of data that gives us a picture of installed base anywhere comes from ComScore, whose monthly data sampling of thousands of users in the US has been giving us a picture of smartphone evolution there since 2009 or so.

New US smartphone users added per month US smartphones users added or lost by month, by platform. Source: ComScore, interpreted by The Guardian

And what does that tell us? That Android is indeed the dominant installed base in the US, with nearly 57m users; next is iOS, with just under 36m users. RIM has 11.8m; Microsoft, 4.2m, and Nokia’s Symbian is still in the not-yet-cold-or-dead hands of just under a million people. In all, more than 110m people in the US has a smartphone – but that’s out of a mobile-owning population of 234m. There’s a huge amount of room for those four platforms (and any new ones) to expand into; more than half of users there don’t yet have a smartphone.

New users, or just new phones?

So in the US, by the ComScore numbers, Android has 51.6% of the installed base of smartphones in the US; iOS 32.4%; RIM 10.7% (but falling); Microsoft 3.8%.

The shocking thing, really, is that the ComScore numbers suggest that the net increase in smartphone ownership over the past three months was less than 4m – yet in that time Gartner is saying 23m handsets were shipped (of which most, one would think, were sold). That’s a lot of trading up by existing users.

We can even break it down further: 13.3m Android devices were shipped to the US; the Android installed base increased by 2.65m (on my interpretation of the figures ComScore releases).

For iPhones, it’s 8.3m shipped, while the installed base increased by just over 3m. On that data, Apple would seem to be getting less churn, and growing its users more as a proportion of shipments than Android.

The intriguing thing with Android’s installed base share is that it is bumping along at about 51%; the distortions in the US market (which make iPhones on contracts cost almost the same as much cheaper Android phones) mean that the iPhone gets a disproportionate share. Every month, about another million featurephone users shift to a smartphone; and it seems that Android captures about half of them, though sometimes the iPhone does. (It’s hard to be sure, though, because there are also defections among platforms, with people leaving RIM and Symbian in particular.) What’s clear is that feature phone users are, slowly but surely, upgrading to smartphones.

Everyone’s a winner

The conclusion? Android is indeed winning – in the US as well as China. But the single "worldwide" figure masks far more complexity in the market than you might think, and the fact that Android’s "market share" (the sales snapshot) is high and growing actually masks a situation in the US – where, like it or not, many of the headline apps appear – that favours the iPhone.

In Europe (for which figures weren’t available), Android likely has a similar advantage – but remember the distortion of the Chinese market on the "average". For the rest of the world, Android is closer to that 56% figure of the US, and other platforms stronger than iOS.

Even then, though, the story isn’t so simple, because of the twin hassles for Android developers of different devices, and of OS fragmentation, and different monetisation.

From the Techcrunch comments, one finds this:

Meanwhile in the discussion on Branch (side note: it’s already useful) about Android fragmentation, there’s a comment from Matt Brezina – co-founder and chief executive of Sincerely, and previously the founder of Outlook inbox organiser Xobni:

I’m on the front lines – building both iPhone & Android apps. I won’t comment on the revenue disparity between the two – that is for a different branch. But I will say we release lower quality, less tested apps on Android because we can never test all devices – we test live with our customers. It sucks. Luckily the Android customers know to submit their android device & OS whenever they send us bug reports.

Fragmentation in my experience has produced less, and lower quality apps.

Of course fragmentation is often in the eye of the beholder; for someone using a device, it doesn’t matter what the latest and greatest version of Android is (and, as is always pointed out, developers can target multiple versions of Android inside the development framework). All that matters is what they have.

OS versions accessing Google Play Android OS versions accessing Google Play over time, by version. Source: Google, The Guardian

And while we’re on that topic, the latest monthly figures from Google Play are in, and show that Android 4.0 is rising rapidly, and has now passed "Froyo" (2.2, released in June 2010). It’s still the year of Gingerbread, but all the signs are that Android 4.x is going to rule 2013.

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2012/aug/16/android-winning-apps-china-smartphone?newsfeed=true

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Is Outsourcing-as-a-Service the Future?

Over the past few months, the popularity and growth of cloud services has increased exponentially as consumers start to realize that the cloud is their only solution to their ever-increasing demand for both computing power and storage space. Companies, therefore, need to prioritize new cloud-based service offerings in order to take advantage of consumers’ expectations.

BPO service providers don’t want to be left behind, as they are now part of the trend of ‘Outsourcing As A Service’, where BPO companies are now including cloud technology into their everyday delivery infrastructure. Doing so allows them to deliver a more technology-intensive solution without increasing their operational costs. BPO companies also benefit from the consumers’ current fondness for cloud technologies, since they can get more credibility by advertising their use of the cloud infrastructure in order to deliver stable and highly scalable services.

Of course, before Outsourcing as a Service fully takes off, enterprises first need to define the term “cloud” based on their industry’s context. There are actually two kinds of cloud that they need to be aware of: the “Utility cloud” and the “Grid Cloud”. The former is mainly commercial, while the latter is made up of different web services and large scale data analysis systems. In order to reduce costs, companies must scale out and produce multiple copies, instead of simply scaling up within the grid cloud. Eventually they will have to move on to utility clouds.

Another reason for the growth of the cloud’s popularity is the industry’s tendency to gravitate towards more automated and tuned processes within businesses. Cloud has become a divisive issue for BPO providers, with one side languishing in the staff supplementation model while the other side sells productivity through automation.

Smaller BPO Providers

Smaller BPO companies will benefit from cloud-based technology, since it levels the playing field. The cloud’s ability to compensate for lack of server farms and limited manpower means that small BPO providers can now compete with large companies in terms of manpower and technology.

The industry’s move to the cloud is fairly smooth, owing to the fact that the converged platform is not based on a fixed model, as different pieces interact with each other through the movement between the supplier and the enterprise.

Whether a small BPO provider can offer the same level of orchestration as a large enterprise lies in their ability to move workloads and how modular their services are. Business will always start slow and simple, but as it grows or mature, there is a need to be able to keep up with them.

The Benefits of Being a Good Cloud Customer

Before a company can migrate to the cloud, it is important that they first experience what it’s like to be a good cloud customer. Not benefiting from the cloud technology on both ends is a terrible waste, so companies need to be good cloud customers first in order to know which provider to get.

This is one of the biggest reasons why the skills and role of the CIO in companies have changed in the past few years in order to accommodate the needs and requirements of a successful cloud implementation. The CIO’s duty has always been to act as the lynchpin of several IT departments, resulting in some CIOs denying the existence of a cloud in their company.

Unfortunately for CIOs, the massive success of pay as you go cloud services from industry giants such as Amazon and Google meant that a lot of business functions have started to bypass the IT department. This means CIOs need to keep up with the times and update their policies in order to have some semblance of control when cloud becomes widely adopted.

The Current Procurement Models and the Flexibility of the Customer

At the moment, the ITO procurement model fails to capitalize on the benefits of flexibility and agility, which is the two main selling points of the cloud. This is because the ITO, which has been the predominant model for procuring cloud services, usually works in monthly time periods, as opposed to the cloud’s ability to deliver in a span of days. This needs to change before companies benefit from the cloud.

In order to facilitate this change, the CIO must change the IT department’s attitude. They must adopt the mindset that they provide services to various business functions. Enterprises must also learn how to respect the IT department as a procurer of services.

At the end of the day, it is important for a company to develop the ability to provide cloud services via different areas of the business. The main challenge rests in the CIOs shoulders, as he or she must try to get people to realize the advantages of cloud services, both in terms of the consumer and the business.

source: http://cloudtimes.org/2012/08/16/outsourcing-as-a-service-future/

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