Benedict Evans

$2m raised on Kickstarter in a few days for an indie game...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:19:00 +0000

$2m raised on Kickstarter in a few days for an indie game development project. Fascinating.

David Remmick, editor of the New Yorker

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:49:44 +0000

David Remmick, editor of the New Yorker

Upgrades

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:40:16 +0000

Motorola announced the Droid Razr on the same day that the latest Nexus phone, the launch flagship for ICS, was launched. (For the uninitiated, ICS is the latest version of Android, released late last year).

Motorola currently does not know if the Droid Razr will be able to run ICS.

In case you’ve forgotten, Google is buying Motorola.

(Via The Verge)

Alex on Blackberries in banks.

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:53:48 +0000

Alex on Blackberries in banks.

Platform wars, app stores and ecosystems

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:15:00 +0000

Experimenting a little with sharing slides: this is a presentation I’ve given at a few conferences on the ‘platform wars’.

The data is taken from a much more dense deck provided to clients of Enders Analysis - feel free to contact me for details.

Does Android fragmentation matter to Google? Not much.

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:53:00 +0000

Clearly, Android fragmentation affects users and developers. It makes it more expensive and less profitable to develop for Android, while users get inconsistent and unpredictable experiences and have access to fewer high-quality apps. Moreover Android devices may not even have Google services such as Maps or Gmail embedded on the device when a consumer buys it, while new versions of the software with prized new features Googlers have slaved over do not make their way to many users. Ice Cream Sandwich will not be on the majority of Android devices sold until at least the second half of 2012. All of this has been discussed to death.

However, Google’s objectives for Android are not directly affected by any of this. Google wants:

To ensure that as many people as possible have access to the entire web on mobile devices
To make sure there is not a dominant mobile platform (originally the fear was Microsoft, then Apple) that can block Google services on mobile

In other words, Google’s priorities for its mobile OS are not what Microsoft’s or Apple’s would be. Google wants more people using the web, because web use means web search and search advertising revenue.

All else is secondary. Even the most fragmented, forked, customised and mangled ‘Android’ device has an open web browser and data connectivity and can drive mobile use of Google Search. Indeed, saying that an Android device like the Kindle Fire ‘has no Google services’ might be true in one sense but misses the underlying point – the browser itself is by far the most important Google Service on any device.

Meanwhile iOS & Android combined now have an active base of over 500m - all with a browser and most with a reasonably generous mobile data bundle. This is 500m mobile AdSense eyeballs. It really doesn’t matter much to Google exactly what the split is: indeed given that iOS users have significantly higher mobile web use, and hence generate more mobile ad impressions, it is almost certainly the case today that an iOS user is more profitable for Google than an Android user.

If it doesn’t matter much if an Adsense impression is on iOS or Android, it certainly doesn’t matter if it is on Android 2.2 or Android 4.

Of course, if it wasn’t for the fact that we know Google isn’t evil, I could point to another reason why Google might be unconcerned by fragmentation: it has the effect of reducing app use, and app use cannibalises web use and web search. In other words, Google’s strategic objective is for there to be as few smartphone apps as possible, even on Android, and fragmentation has precisely that effect.

This discussion is taken from a report I wrote for Enders Analysis this week

Sony and Samsung in one image. Sad, really - Sony always CARED...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:19:00 +0000

Sony and Samsung in one image.

Sad, really - Sony always CARED more about the product, somehow (or projected that sense) - at least it puts more thought into the fit and finish. But the combination of faltering TV leadership and a faltering (to put it mildly) phone business means Samsung is racing ahead, at least on this rather unscientific metric.

The global handset business in one chart. Very striking...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:44:00 +0000

The global handset business in one chart. Very striking polarisation between Apple on one hand and Nokia/Samsung on the other.

It is equally clear that most of the other smartphone/Android players are pretty sub-scale.

This will be part of a big report I’m publishing for Enders Analysis next week.

"The Apple TV product is doing actually very well. In last fiscal year that ended in September, we..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:25:00 +0000

“The Apple TV product is doing actually very well. In last fiscal year that ended in September, we sold a bit above 2.8 million units. And just in the past quarter, the December quarter, we set a new quarterly record for Apple TV at over 1.4 million. But in the scheme of things, if you dollarize this in revenue that — we still classify this as a hobby. However, we continue to add things to it and if you’re using the latest one, I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t live without it. And so I think it’s a fantastic product. And we continue to pull the string to see where it takes us. But other than that, I don’t have any comments.”

- Tim Cook, Q1 fiscal 2012 (i.e. December 2011) results call

Meet the saviour of RIM. Sell.

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:31:55 +0000

Meet the saviour of RIM. Sell.

Windows Phone

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:54:00 +0000

An idle observation: Windows Phone has an embedded Facebook client that forms part of the address book, home page and half the screens in the OS. Microsoft tries very hard to get you to enable it when you turn on your new phone.

According to Facebook, there are now 1.3m active users of this client: see here (yes, this is the integrated one, not the one you can download yourself)

This number has gone up by 300k since mid-November. I would suggest that this means it is very unlikely that more than, say, 3-400k Nokia Windows Phones have been sold in the last two months. Certainly, this data point would be impossible to reconcile with the rumours of of several million units that are floating around.

We might or might not find out whether I’m right on Thursday, when Nokia reports Q4 2011 results: it will be interesting to see if they disclose that data point.

UPDATE

Well, Nokia sold ‘well over 1m Lumias’. How interesting. Either the Facebook data is wrong (unlikely), or a very high proportion of people buying the devices don’t set up the built-in Facebook integration, despite that being a major selling point. Interesting.

The B&O Beolit. Airplay is one of those unsung Apple...

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 20:59:05 +0000

The B&O Beolit.

Airplay is one of those unsung Apple features that makes the lock-in that much more compelling. No reasons this isn’t an open industry standard, except that Apple just did it.

"They built Microsoft TV, they demoed it for us, they asked for rate cards but then said ‘ooh..."

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:49:22 +0000

“They built Microsoft TV, they demoed it for us, they asked for rate cards but then said ‘ooh ah, that’s expensive’”

- Media exec on Microsoft’s TV subscription plans

The Joy of Books

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:58:32 +0000

The Joy of Books

Nokia Lumia 900: the same as the 800 but for the USA: LTE,...

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:49:00 +0000

Nokia Lumia 900: the same as the 800 but for the USA: LTE, bigger battery and a better camera. Sensible, but will still need a LOT of marketing (oh, and one of those ecosystem things)

Interview: Samsung’s David Steel on Apple, the future of...

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:41:06 +0000

Interview: Samsung’s David Steel on Apple, the future of TVs, and what’s next (The Verge)

Upgrade paths

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:31:00 +0000

“Samsung Smart TV will evolve every year w/out having to buy a new TV. You’ll never be left behind”

Meanwhile:

“A full update to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for the GALAXY Tab(7-inch) and GALAXY S is not practicable due to hardware limitations”

The Galaxy S was the flagship Samsung Android smartphone, on sale well into 2011.

So, Samsung’s smartphones, which are supposed to be an open platform, do not get OS upgrades. The TVs, which are conventionally thought of as ‘dumb’, get new features pushed out. Guess which product lines runs a platform that Samsung controls, and which runs someone else’s platform?

‘Couch commerce’: eBay mobile VP Steve...

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:13:00 +0000

‘Couch commerce’: eBay mobile VP Steve Yankovich eBay shows Scoble a new app for iPad that lets you see things you can buy on eBay that is associated with TV shows. Lots of innovation in this area.

Ice Cream Sandwich

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:31:00 +0000

Google has disclosed Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) devices as a percentage of the install base today. The figure is 0.6%.

What’s that in units? Google is very vague (to the point of obfuscation) about Android, but Google disclosed 200m activated devices in the second week of November, and Andy Rubin tweeted that there was a run rate of 700k daily activations on 21 December. A straight multiplication gets to 230m or so activated devices today - not a very good number (at all!) but better than nothing.

Now, activated devices isn’t the same as devices active today (which is the number to apply the ISC % to) because some old ones will have been deactivated. But in reality Android has only really been on sale since early 2010 so very few devices are more than 2 years old, and we can ignore this today. In the course of 2012 I’ll have to start making an estimate of that.

So, 0.6% multiplied by 230m = 1.3m or so. At this scale, it matters that Google is only giving the percentage to one decimal place - if it was actually 0.64%, for example, it would be closer to 1.5m. So, I’d say 1-1.5m.

We have no way of knowing how this breaks down between upgraded and new devices (though Google presumably has that data).

Next post: tablet stats.

The holding page for Iliad’s soon-to-launch 4th mobile...

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:19:00 +0000

The holding page for Iliad’s soon-to-launch 4th mobile operator in France. Best pre-launch page ever?

It will be interesting to see how Xavier Niel approaches the market - France is not as competitive as it could be. But no fourth entrant has ever made any real money, and I don’t expect him to be any different.