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« Ok, a Few Words About Microsoft Under Satya Nadella | Main | Sony Q4 Results in Smartphone Wars - We now have all rankings for Top 10 for 2013 - and some tidbits »

February 06, 2014



Thanks Tomi. Was pretty sure you delete that one too. :-)

So, from 77 M units up to 103 M looks good only until you take a look what's going around you. If, with "such impressive growth", you're market share goes down from 47% to 33%, you should understand that it's not OK. You call this modest, I'm not so sure... 26 M more devices than in previous year, market share down by 14 %-points. Growth? Sure, but not in a healthy way. But then again, that story we know already - we just debate if it started in 2010 or far earlier.


The goal with market share is to leverage ubiquity to influence the direction of the market. Here is the right way to look at market share growth: the "finish line" in the market share race is 100% market share. You can't get more than that, and if you achieve it you control the market utterly until something disruptive comes along. Anybody can look at how much they improved by considering their motion toward the finish line. In this case "opportunity" at any point in time is the distance to the goal: 100% - your share. This gives small share starters an advantage, but a fair one - the opportunity before them is much greater as they have more of the market to gain. An improvement then would be to improve (1 - (100 - share finish) / (100 - share start)) for any period, as that is the fraction of the distance moved toward the goal.

With 68% share in 2012, Android really didn't have a lot of distance left to the goal (using Canalys figures). The start opportunity is 32% (100 - 68). Going to 79% they closed on the goal by 11 points and the finish opportunity is 21%. 1 - (21/32) = .337. They have moved 1/3rd of the way to the goal. They achieved 1/3rd of the opportunity before them (total ownership of the mobile ecosystem) in one year. That's a fast rocket and the goal is within view. They will probably slow down on this metric this year, as the loyalty of Apple's fan base is playing "goal line defense" in American football idiom, and will increasingly resist Android's march to the goal as it approaches.

Now look at Windows Phone. Finish opportunity is 97%. They don't give us the "before" number but we can figure it out. "Shipments increased 90% to 32.1 million" = start units 16.9 million. Divide by 2012 units given as 785 million and you get 2.2% start share. That's an embarrassing figure for Microsoft, and that's probably why it's not given. Start opportunity is 97.8%. 1 - (97 / 97.8) = 0.008. Microsoft has achieved 8 tenths of one percent of the goal of 100% market share. That finish line looks horribly distant. Since Windows Phone is the only one that needs three digits to express the difference rounding may skew the numbers, but not much. There is no denying that they are not approaching the goal at any appreciable rate. They are in no danger of influencing the course of mobile technology until they change this.

On this scale Apple is moving backward but of course they aren't running in the market share race. They are playing for money instead and winning at that sport. We will see eventually how wise this strategy is. For now they are dining on gravy.

"Other" and everybody in that category moved backwards, of course.


What clear is that WP8 is done. Bill Gates doesn't went out to public and declares a failure long before work on fixing that begun. Microsoft pulled out of WP - remember Nokia's outcry ~a year ago? see the minimum changeset coming to 8.1? - aborted the WP8-line, moved all resources to a new strategy.

Is it a WP9 or is it a complete new, different strategy the new CEO needs to bring to the market? I bet, I am sure, its the end of WP in that form. Think a minute how such a syrategy-shift could look like. What if your goal is selling devices, services, connecting them? Microsoft is Windows and they shift away. WP makes no sense. Amdroid does. Take it, replace Google services and Samsung devices, profit. What did the new CEO lead? Services. What's Nokia job? Devices. They are working on connecting these, making a product and only quesrion left is if basing it on Windows is helping or preventing to succeed.

Would a Microsoft/Nokia Normandy fit? Hell, yes!

Tomi T Ahonen

ROTFL - you are DEFINITELY not the real Baron95 haha.. cheers! the beers are on me! 007 :-)



"Why is this discussion relevant?"

It clearly isn't. You should tell that to the morons releasing such nonsensical, misleading and sensationalist headlines - and even more to the journalists copying this nonsense without thinking about it.

The discussion isn't about the WP performance but about the way it is reported.

Satya Nutela


You're also using wrong metric when discussing BlackBerry OS. You always report the total of both BB device OS non-10 and OS 10. But when discussing Windows OS, you always insist on seperating the Windows Mobile and Windows Phone platform and pointing the failure of Microsoft.

The BB 10 is TOTAL failure. It's Q4 shipment of BB10 is lower than it's Q3 shipment.


Apple is really going down, major decline, on the cliff. Why is it hard for you to accept that. It's not deemed cool anymore. Maybe you had a hard time changing from iOS to other device, but not all iOS think so.




@Satya Nutela

Thats to easy. C'mon, stop comparing BB to WP. We know BB is in deep trouble. So, whatw your point in comparing that to WP? To show its in lesser deep trouble? Fine, but hey, deep trouble is deep trouble.

No, no. The pattern here is not BB but its about Android and iOS and WP. That total failure of PR that so called 'analysts' putted into there *PR* bullshit doesn't compare with C64, which btw is even doing more worse theh WP this days!, doesn't compare with Windows CE and doesn't compare with BB. They compare with iOS and Android. Just like Microsoft pushs that marketing-messages that WP outsold iOS in some countries. So stupid. So wrong if you take there goal and analyse performance. Fact is WP failed so horrible there is no way they can recover, there is no way they have ever a posibility to change that. WP is done, thqt chapter is closed like the Zune-experiment.

Move beyond that silly minds trying to explain you how well WP is doing, has momentum, is outselling iOS, is growing faster then Android. Its all that, people trying to bullshit you playing so silly statistic-games that its nothing but shame for those having a bit of IQ, math-knowledge, not being so dump to take that as truth.

Now close that chapter and look in the future. Satya Nutella is there to apply the new strategy moving away from there old Windows-platform game. Satya Nutella is there to make that happen. WP is the old game, its his job to close that WP failure and focus on a new strategy.

Fact is, WP is more dead then BB10. Not in terms of market share, not in terms of any statistic-numbers. But unlike WP that BB10 thing may continue trying to move from failure to profit. WP is closed, its done. BB10 may still be there in n years in some niche surviving after reaching a break-even thanks to drastic cuts.


@Satya Nutela.

Yes, it is really hilarious that Microsoft trumpets that WP is outselling iphone in some poor countries like Kenya, Argentina and India. The iphone is an expensive luxury item in these countries while the Lumia 520 is sold at a loss at bargain bin price. In India the latest iphone model can cost twice the pay of a graduate engineer. This is like Toyota trumpeting the fact that it outsells BMW in some poor countries.



"Apple will be "going down" when another manufacturer is taking APPLE's market away from them. It's actually Samsung which is seeing downward sales of it's premium phones...not Apple."

Or when Apple's users feel there's no more reason to upgrade every two years.
The market currently depends on ridiculously short upgrade cycles. Once these disappear things wil definitely change, we already see this in the PC market - which is not stagnating because of mobile but mostly because it's pointless to buy a new system every few years, in particular for casual users which can easily live with a 10+ year old system as the current marker share of Windows XP amply demonstrates.

Satya Nutela


My english must be very bad that you think different than what I meant. LOL
In this article, Tomi asking Canalyst to say sorry because canalyst try to trick the world using 'statistic'. I simply point out, that while tomi always try to show truthness in statistic and seperating Windows Mobile and Windows Phone.... Tomi fail to do the same in BlackBerryOS. BB OS 10 is very different than BB OS before 10. Thus, if Tomi seperate the statistic of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone to show Windows Phone failure, Tomi must do the same to BlackBerry, and show BB 10 failure, which is worse than WP.


Is there even any source that separates these two?

I don't think so which makes the entire thing quite hard. You are right, of course, these two are as different as Symbian vs. Windows Phone 7.


@Satya Nutela
So you still talk about BB10 to make that point that WP is not the only platform doing bad, worst, misserable? Ok, if thats your point take it home and close your BB-comparision now.

For separating numbers: you did not see Tomi separate WP7 and WP8 in this article too or did you? Reason is easy: we are talking about total failure so separating it future makes no sense. The failure is there, it just doesn't matter if its leser failure then BB or more failure if you separate Lumina 520 out (whih is low end andnplays in another segment), if you do x or y. It doesn't change anything that Nokia, WP, Microsoft failed. The chapter is done and closed. Accept it.


Of course, considering that Windows Phone didn't even come out until November 2010 (real availability started Q1 2011), some might accuse you of being manipulative and lying yourself, Tomi...

The only way you were able to make it look like a recovery, was by slapping WP's marketshare numbers together with the marketshare of Windows Mobile. An ancient mobile OS that have nothing in common with WP, except for the fact that they were both made in Redmond.
(Now granted, if you had called the graph, and presented it as something like: "Total marketshare of Microsoft's mobile OS" it would be more honest.)

Isn't what you did here, the same kind of dishonesty you're accusing Canalys of? Only telling part of the picture by misrepresenting numbers and showing them out of context?



You are wrong. Microsoft chose voluntarily to make WP completely incompatible with their predecessor so it's completely valid to include both in the graph. They shot themselves in the foot with this, and other manufacturers doing the same thing would also be handled the same, see Blackberry for an example.

And no matter what you measure against, for both Microsoft and Nokia the growth of last year looks utterly pathetic if you compare it to where both companies once were.

Rob G


"They knew what they were doing and we can't expect journalists - verbally talented people - to have wanted to study statistics at university."

As this is business-related news, I would kind of expect a journalist worth his pay to be able to analyse these kind of figures for distortions. At the very least, they should run the figures by someone who does understand statistics.


How many of those "Android" devices are real Android devices, with Google Play?

As of 2013, only about half. The other 50% are running forks of Android with proprietary stores from players like Xiaomi and Amazon.

Isn't it thus equally misleading to present them as one market opportunity, when they're so fragmented?


You're just half way there.
Majority of phones that Samsung sells are low-end phones whose buyers are very unlikely to spend money on apps and services. So even having Google ecosystem on board does not mean the phone contributes to that ecosystem in any meaningful (read: profit-generating) way.

Someone should be first to do comparisons of ecosystems in a metric that matters.


Still FUDing?

First, since when is China 50% of the world market - and yes, that's the only market where no Google services are provided. Not quite surprisingly, due to the language barrier it's not the most interesting market for Western developers.
Amazon is mere noise and doesn't count.

Second, if a Western developer was interested in China they could still sell their Android software there, it's still the same OS with the same API (hence no significant added development costs, unlike porting to Windows Phone, for example (other than doing Chinese translation, that is, but that'd also be required if it was sold through Google.
As for Amazon, unless some software requires Google services, it's no hassle to release on Amazon as well. My current employer is doing that for all products, they also publish in Samsung's market.

It's clear that you guys have no clue what presents a genuine barrier for entry into a market and what does not. Just using another app store is minor, having to reprogram your software for another OS is a completely different story.


Microsoft's Windows Phone is best for me. İt's my idea :)

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