Google Android gains ground - Warc

LONDON: Google Android is now the leading smartphone operating system by new sales in eight major markets worldwide, a list including Japan, the UK and US.

Kantar Worldpanel, the insights provider, reported that Android contributed 45.2% of UK smartphone sales in the 12 weeks ending 12 June, 2011, increasing from 10.7% a year earlier.

Research in Motion, manufacturer of the BlackBerry, also saw a modest annual lift, reaching 22.3%, compared with a starting point of 19.4%.

"BlackBerry's competitive pricing allows younger consumers to switch to a smartphone device at a price they can afford," Dominic Sunnebo, Kantar Worldpanel's global consumer insight director, said.

"BlackBerry is currently attracting the most upgrading shoppers with 84.9% of its new customers previously owning a non-smartphone."

"Our data shows that most first-time smartphone owners look for lower prices."

By contrast, Nokia's Symbian registered a decline from 32.7% to 10.7%, while Apple's iOS witnessed a slide from 30.6% to 18.3%.

However, the iPhone 4 was named as the top-selling handset in the UK for the last 12 months.

Indeed, 74.3% of new Android sales were drawn from individuals not already possessing a smartphone, measured against 1.4% that had formerly utilised an iPhone.

"With 63% of British consumers still owning a non-smartphone, future growth lays with upgrading customers," Sunnebo said.

Staying in Europe, Android's proportion of sales had grown from 3.1% to 41.3% in Germany, alongside improving from 1.6% to 26.1% in Italy.

Similarly, the Google-developed operating system logged a 41.3% share in Spain, an increase from 7.6% year on year, and accrued over 15 percentage points in France, hitting 37.5%.

Apple's iOS posted a decrease of 9.2 percentage points in Germany, to 18.4%, was off by 13.3 percentage points in France, yielding 17.9%, and experienced a smaller 1.5% percentage point fall in Spain, to 5.7%.

More positively for Apple, its share rose by 6.8 percentage points in Italy, attaining 20.6% overall.

"We are yet to see any real signs of consumers switching between Android and Apple," Sunnebo continued. "Apple and Android's customers are intensely loyal when choosing their upgrade."

"One reason for this is the investment consumers make in their device through apps. In France for example, the average iPhone costs €215, and 17% of iPhone owners download more than ten apps each month."

"This investment is then lost if they want to choose a different OS as the apps are non-transferable."

In the US, Google's Android recorded an uptick from 19% to 57%, and Apple delivered an expansion from 21.1% to 28.7%.

Such progress largely came at the expense of Windows and Symbian, both down by around ten percentage points, taking shares of 2.6% and just 0.2% respectively.

Elsewhere, in percentage point terms, Nokia's operating system suffered contractions topping 20 percentage point terms everywhere but the US and France, where this decline stood at 3.9%.

Its share of sales now peaks in Spain, at 40.2%, a figure which can be compared with the 77.8% secured in the country during the corresponding timeframe in 2010.

Android's rise was also confirmed by data from Japan, where it contributed 64.7% of acquisitions in this period monitored, gaining nearly 40 percentage points.

This could be placed in context when assessed next to the slide of ten percentage points, to 27.7%, endured by Apple, and Symbian's drop of 27 percentage points, to only 3.7%.

Data sourced from Kantar Worldpanel; additional content by Warc staff, 12 July 2011

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Google Blows It Big Time: Microsoft, Apple, RIM Get Nortel Patents - ZDNet (blog)

Google (GOOG) has pulled off a rare feat in business: blowing an opportunity so big that the company will be living with the fallout for a really long time. Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), and RIM (RIMM) — in a consortium with Sony (SNE), EMC, and Ericsson (ERIC) — bought the Nortel patent portfolio for $4.5 billion in an auction. Google’s original bid of $900 million simply wasn’t enough.

You can debate whether the patents of the bankrupt Canadian communications company were intrinsically worth that much. However, value is relative. The winning group here will get more than its money’s worth because it’s managed to keep an important weapon away from its biggest mobile competitor. And Google lost its best chance to negotiate some healthy live-and-let-live agreements with rivals intent on putting it out of the mobile business — a business that is critical to Google.

Hit us, please

Google has had a sloppy approach to patents when it comes to Android. That has given Oracle (ORCL) room to allege infringement and demand $2.6 billion in damages. But even worse is that Microsoft and Apple have threatened Android’s existence with a series of patent infringement lawsuits.

Most have targeted Google’s hardware partners because they have less money to defend themselves than the search giant, and so could become a choke point for Android’s business. Make things too expensive for the hardware companies, and they might reevaluate whether the product is a commercially viable option.

It’s expensive being Google’s BFF

Microsoft already has at least four companies paying, one of which is HTC, a big name in mobile phones. Both Motorola (MMI) and Barnes & Noble (BKS) are fighting in court, but neither has Microsoft’s deep pockets. Add a significant per-unit cost for Android, and suddenly licensing Windows Phone might look far more appealing, particularly since Microsoft indemnifies its users for patent infringement actions.

That’s why the 6,000 Nortel patents were so important to Google. The entire mobile industry has worked on cross-licensing and the threat of mutual destruction. Only Google entered this nuclear arms race armed with a pea shooter. The Nortel patents would have given it a better negotiation position. (You also have to ask whether the consortium might now pursue Google and its partners for allegedly infringing any of the Nortel patents.)

Would Google’s problems have disappeared with the patent portfolio? Not a chance. But as intellectual property analyst and blogger Florian Mueller wrote to a number of us that cover IP issues, “Google lost an unprecedented opportunity to acquire a major bargaining chip that would strengthen it at the mobile industry’s intellectual property negotiating table.”

No second chances

His use of the term unprecedented is anything but hype. This was a one-time chance Google needed to protect its investment in Android, which represents the company’s entire future. The final price was stiff, and even with its big bankroll, Google would have difficulty in matching the combined resources of the companies in the consortium.

However, it should have been worth more than $4.5 billion to Google. This was a must-win for the company. Did it have the money to go higher? Without a doubt. Failing to ensure a successful bid is the single biggest mistake the company has made, because this is one from which it cannot recover.

Related:

Image: Flickr user Calgary Reviews, CC 2.0.

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First Microsoft, now Google: Does the government have it in for consumers? - CNET

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See the authors' bios below.

Ten years ago this week, an appeals court upheld Microsoft's conviction for monopolizing the PC operating system market. The decision became a key legal precedent for U.S. antitrust enforcement. It also cemented the government's confidence in its ability to pick winners and losers in fast-moving technology markets--a confidence not borne out by subsequent events.

Now this sad history seems to be repeating itself: By uncanny coincidence, news broke just last Friday that the FTC had begun an antitrust investigation into Google's business practices. Unfortunately, there's no reason to expect the outcome to be any better for consumers this time around.

There is, in fact, no evidence that the case against Microsoft or its settlement contributed to the spectacular innovation in the IT sector over the last decade. Indeed, they may even have solidified Microsoft's role as the perennial also-ran in this latest wave of technological progress, as the company struggled to keep innovating under the threat of constant antitrust scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad.

The true lesson of the Microsoft case is this: antitrust intervention in information technology has a poor track record of serving consumers. Even Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who was a court-appointed Special Master in that case and has since championed government tinkering with the Internet, finally admitted in 2007 that he "blew it on Microsoft" by underestimating the potential for innovation and market forces to dethrone Microsoft, particularly through the rise of open-source software (which now in part powers Apple's popular iOS).

But even that misses the importance of the broader, unimaginable technological evolutions that rendered the Microsoft case moot before it began. First, the desktop operating system is fast losing its central importance as more and more desktop applications are run in "the cloud" (Webmail, Salesforce.com, Tweetdeck, etc.). This evolution has been driven largely by open Web standards like HTML--which predate the remedy in the Microsoft case.

Second, Microsoft's desktop operating system is significantly threatened by the mobile revolution, and Microsoft's own forays into this market have been singularly unsuccessful. Tellingly, in 2007, when Apple transformed the mobile market with the iPhone, Microsoft released Windows Vista, the "Edsel" of operating systems. Apple's market cap is now larger than Microsoft's--a result unthinkable just a decade ago.

Finally, Microsoft has struggled to compete with Google, a company that supports with advertising revenues a growing variety of free (cloud-based) offerings beyond Internet search and in areas (operating systems, e-mail, Web browsing, word processing...) central to Microsoft's business.

In all three cases, Microsoft moved too slowly to keep up. And in all three cases the government and the courts (and likely even Microsoft itself) failed to anticipate these evolving threats to Microsoft's business.

The Microsoft case demonstrates how hard it is for antitrust regulators to determine which technologies and business models will ultimately best serve consumers, largely because they simply cannot predict how digital markets will evolve. The Justice Department of 1998 (when the Microsoft case began) couldn't have predicted the rise of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Chrome, Android, the iPhone, or cloud computing. Indeed, who in 1998, or even 2001, could have imagined that Microsoft would face an existential threat to its Windows, server, and Office-focused business model from a company that provides free, ad-supported services built on a core Internet search business--and that was incorporated just a month before Microsoft's antitrust case began? So how can today's FTC possibly predict how search will change, or how Google's success might be disrupted by "social" search (e.g., via Facebook), "semantic" search (understanding language), or any other combination of possibilities?

Even if Google today were the monopolist Microsoft supposedly was a decade ago, it doesn't follow that another drawn-out antitrust battle and cumbersome consent decree will actually benefit consumers. If anything, the futility of the Microsoft case demonstrates the wisdom of letting rapid technological change play out in digital markets.

Moreover, the Justice Department in the Microsoft case at least seemed genuinely focused on antitrust's bedrock consumer welfare standard. But today, the FTC seems to be motivated largely by a desire to lower the bar for future antitrust interventions, with Google's rivals cheering the agency on. Recent statements by FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz (a Democrat) and Commissioner Thomas Rosch (a Republican) suggest their agency intends to prosecute Google under "Section 5" of the FTC Act rather than the agency's more traditional Sherman Act "Section 2" authority. Commissioner Rosch has claimed that a Section 5 unfair competition claim could address conduct that has the effect of "reducing consumer choice." But a reduction of choice of competitors put out of business by pro-competitive behavior is not a harm to consumer welfare, and such a case would (and should) fail under Section 2. The fact that Google's rivals--including Microsoft itself--are complaining about the company suggests, ironically, that Google's practices are in fact pro-competitive and thus pro-consumer.

It took Professor Lessig years to admit that he "blew it" on Microsoft. Here's hoping Chairman Leibowitz and the FTC are quicker to recognize the dangers of antitrust intervention in fast-moving markets. Another legal precedent like the Microsoft decision will hamstring not only Google but also, eventually, other innovative companies that might someday dethrone Google. How will that benefit consumers?

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Android 4.0 loaded Google Nexus 4G : This "monster" could chomp down Apple - International Business Times

Sporting a "monster sized" screen with high definition capabilities, dual processor, very thin size, and Android Ice Cream Sandwich OS, Google's Nexus 4G could give Apple's iPhone 5 some heavy competition as both devices are set to have similar release dates. 

The Nexus 4G rumors have sounded very attractive as the latest Android device may seem to be the most powerful smartphone to hit the market.  One of them says that the device will be powerful enough to run the Android 4.0 operating system which will include 3D features, Open GL head tracking for facial expressions and sensing.  For gamers, they can have USB capabilities enabling them to plug in external hardware devices such as an Xbox controller.  The open platform can allow developers to sync up various devices ranging from remotes, controllers, to bikes.  This opens a huge door of opportunities for apps running on the next generation Nexus 4G. 

According to reports, Apple has many features rolled up in its sleeve for the iPhone 5, including integration with the anticipated iCloud and ramped up iOS.  Speculations on iPhone 5 specs include an A5 processor with large end-to-end screen and very thin sized incorporating a teardrop shape design. 

If the iPhone 5 is to run with the same A5 processor found in the iPad 2, floating in the 1 GHz range, then the Nexus 4G will have an advantage with its 1.2 or 1.5 GHz dual core processor, possibly a 28nm Qualcomm Snapdragon Krait, and 1 GB of ram. 

The Nexus 4G design utilizes a spacious touchscreen but eliminates all the hardware physical buttons, possibly utilizing Google's continuing development of voice search and commands.  The iPhone 5 curved glass touchscreen has also been in talks with reports of Apple already processing machinery to create the touchscreen glass displays.    Apple also will launch their iOS 5 platform that incorporates voice technology through Nuance voice command app.  Apple's move may appear to be a counter to Android, which has already integrated voice features early on with much investment in improving the feature for Ice Cream Sandwich.    

It may still be too early to determine if Nexus 4G can truly take a bite out of its rival, but the specs and rumors have seemed very impressive for this fall's matchup against Apple's iPhone 5.   

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