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05/28/2013, 05:36 PM
#1
So i come here this morning only to find panicked speculation based on a few words from an article written in another language.
Relax.
Let's look at market situation for a moment, both past and present.
So.. In the past few years, since the introduction of the iPhone, the mobile device industry always had a new trick up its sleeve in form of newer, more advanced hardware. That was a failproof way of making each consecutive generation of the device more attractive and desirable than last year's. It worked.
But if you analyse how this was done, you would see that they've hit a ceiling of sorts. Looking at the iPhone, up until iPhone 5 it has retained the same form factor and physical dimensions of the screen, all while increasing memory, battery capacity, storage space, screen resolution and processing power.
Then came the oversized slab phone trend, which allowed the manufacturers the cram laptop-like hardware specs into a phone that doesn't fit too comfortably in the hand. But here they've reached a point where increasing pixel density past 1080p and so on, doesn't give much of a noticeable improvement. A faster CPU feels too hot in the hand, a bigger battery feels heavy, like a brick.
So inevitably they've reached a point when they can't really one-up each other's breathtaking specs, and a consumer doesn't necessarily use so much power for anything other than a trophy, a bragging right. The customer's incentive to upgrade runs out.
There's a whole world out there that will keep buying whatever is new (and even old and used), but every company has to have a flagship product to dangle in their shareholders' faces, to say that the company is still viable and on top of its game. With the hardware advantage fading and relatively unknown manufacturers like Oppo using the same components to also produce eye-catching world-class devices, the focus turns to less tangible things like software and marketing.
Android has been both a blessing and a curse for the industry, giving a software/service platform for the manufacturers to compete with Apple, but also turning many of its corporate customers into "me too" clones and Samsung taking lead as the "Apple equivalent" of Android, with the others trying to copy it. Another factor is that Android is provided by Google, who own Motorola Mobility and are no longer bound by a non-compete agreement starting next year (i think).
So what do you do?
Companies now have to leverage whatever is left, such as brand recognition (Samsung and Apple), brand loyalty (Samsung and Apple again), catchy marketing campaigns and innovation on the software/ecosystem side. The same stuff they had to work with before, but now with less of a hardware advantage.
Companies whose product lines have become Android clones are aware that if they dropped off the map and disappeared today, the average consumer would not know or care. LG is one of those companies (no matter how good their products are), and this is primarily why we saw a VP of the mobile division saying publicly that it's time to branch out and not put all eggs in the Android basket (my words, not his). Even Samsung, whose Android devices hold a dominant and prestigious position continues to develop Tizen (which is their Bada OS, having also absorbed Meego [Nokia's Maemo + Intel's Moblin])
Everyone knows that the market situation won't get any better, even the winners. Everyone is looking for their backup option. Android is the "generic" to Apple's "name brand", and they all see that Apple had the right strategy all along (even if i think the iOS UI paradigm is inferior to ours). With Google not having an iron-fisted monopoly over the Android app marketplace (there are other competing Android app stores besides Google Play) and the apps being usable on other platforms (via emulator), it's now possible to "live without" Android, to squeeze it out and throw it away, for those who are willing. Blackberry has their emulator, Jolla has licensed Myriad's Dalvik implementation for their Sailfish OS. The app infrastructure has "metastasized" so to speak...
There's no clear cut answer, and i may well have lost my plot in the process, turning this into a muddled and inferior piece of writing... But...
Don't panic. The market situation is turning in our favor. WebOS didn't die a closed-source death in the bowels of HP. LG bought webOS for their TV division, but they do in fact own the code and can transfer engineers around if they choose to.
Neither panic nor unbridled optimism on our part really fit this situation, but please, don't turn good news into bad. Android has hit its limit of sustainable growth, and this is definitely something to celebrate.
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