Smartphone future - mobile OS or mobile manufacturer

Looking at what has been going on over the last 6 to 8 months, a picture seems to be forming about the smartphone markets future. Just a year ago everybody where talking about the three part mobile OS race, it now seem that everybody should be talking about the three part phone manufacture race. A year ago there was Apple on the one side and Samsung, Motorola, HTC, LG and ZTE on the other side. This is changing and changing rapidly. Motorola, HTC, LG and ZTE are not gone, but on the other side they do not sell anything like the units of Apple and Samsung.

Motorola never really got into the smartphone race. They had every chance. First they got a deal with Google to launch Google’s tablet series, and later when Google ended up buying them. Google decision not to build on the Motorola potential, will be the death of them.

HTC had a wonderful run back in the beginning of 2011. But they got greedy and customers jumped ship. They came back in a big way with the One series, but Samsung had had time to scoop up HTC customers and HTC could not get them back. HTC is now in free fall, and trying to regain some momentum by returning to the late 2011 dayes by pumping out new phones. I do not see how that is going to help anything.

LG was on the way out of phones all together, but landed a deal with Google to make it’s latest Nexus phone. LG never had it in them to build a good smartphone, and the first reactions to the Nexus 4 seems to be telling the same story.

ZTE, and Huawei, are still wildcards. They are big in their local markets, but they are having a hard time making it in Europe and the US, mainly due to Samsung’s success. I expect that they will continue to make large dents in the Android market, but only on their home turf.

So where does that leave the Smartphone market? Apple is not moving aside. As long as consumers keep loving the brand and the iOS user experience, Apple will have a long and very profitable run. Samsung seems to be the Android market by now, and the only company that can match Apple in units sold. The huge success of the Galaxy S III and the Note II just seems to have no end.

Is Microsoft a contender? They want and need to make the Windows 8/Windows Phone 8 ecosystem popular. I’m sure that Windows 8 will do okay, but Windows Phone 8 is in trouble even before it’s really launched. Microsoft has HTC, Nokia and Samsung backing WP8. Nokia has the most units out there, with 3 models. HTC has two and Samsung has made one model.

Nokia’s future depends on WP8 taking off, and it’s my personal belief that they are not going to make it. They do have the best WP8 phone out there, in my opinion. Nokia’s problem is that in the most important market, the US, they just do not have the brand to pull through. HTC, by now, is almost as dependent on the success of WP8 as Nokia. They have a brand, also in the US, and very good phones It makes sense for Microsoft to back them as much, or even more, as Nokia. Samsung is in Windows Phone just to be there. They do not need the business in the same way Nokia and HTC does. It also shows on the phone. It’s in no way as innovative as the others.

Microsoft has to make WP8 break into the dual digits market share through the sales of Nokia and HTC. It’s going to be a long and expensive drive. Nokia will not have the money for this, unless Microsoft gives them more or end up buying them. I don’t see that happening. HTC might have the money to do it, but I don’t belive they have the guts to stay in there. They will need to start making money long before WP8 will start bringing it in.

This leaves Microsoft itself. The Nokia/HTC situation I just described above leads me to think that there just might something to the rumors about Microsoft doing a Surface Phone. It makes a lot of sense. Buying Nokia is too much of a hassle and as hard as it might sound I think what Microsoft is planning to do is wait. They will put out it’s own phone and then buy up the bits of Nokia that adds value, ones Nokia files for bankruptcy.

I believe that in another 12 months we will not be talking about a three mobile OS race, but about the Apple, Samsung and Microsoft smartphone race.

The battle of the eco-system - The death of Android

Google’s Android seems unstoppable right now. It’s the biggest mobile OS in the US and it just surpassed Symbian in India, a country where Nokia have reigned supreme for many years. It’s hard to imagine that this flight toward total market domination could crash and burn any time soon, but there are indications that Google could lose momentum in its fight to stay on top.

The first indication is the obvious one. Where Apple is keeping its, rather large, share of the mobile market with only three phones, Google has Android on hundreds of phone. So even if Android is the most used mobile OS in the world, it’s only due to the very large support from mobile phone manufacturers right now. Google will have to make sure that they stay happy with their choice of Android, and many of them do manufactur phones with others mobile OS’s.

The next two indications both come from what we have seen and heard about Andorid 4 (ICS). First installment is Android 4 as a mobile OS. Despite the fact that everybody that have tested it says it’s the best version of Android by far, they also state that it’s still not at easy to use as iOS. The learning curve is a lot steeper on Android and will discouraged a lot of users from picking Android as their next Smartphone OS. The other learned fact is that Google with Android 4 decided to focus on the mobile experience and leave the tablet part of the OS mostly like it was on Android 3.2 (Honeycomb). The reason this is bad for Google is because Android 3.2 never gained traction against the iPad, mainly because it’s maybe even harder to learn then Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), and that is not a good place to be. So where Apple is adding important new features in their latest release iOS 5.0. Google is still trying to fix the user experience with their release, Android 4.

Next up is the eco-system Google has to offer. Google has a mobile OS, a tablet OS and a desktop OS, just like Apple and Microsoft has. On top of the important three OS’s Google has an impressive amount of services. So what is wrong?

The OS’s
Microsoft has the biggest desktop OS, Apple has the biggest tablet OS, and Google has the biggest mobile OS. The problem is that Apple’s desktop OS is doing quite well, Microsoft is building its tablet OS on Windows, and nether of Google’s other OS’s is doing any business.

The services
Google has the biggest search engine, Apple has the biggest music and app store and Microsoft has the biggest gaming platform. The problem is that Apple either has, as good a service or hooks into Google’s service better than Google does and Microsoft owns the platform for cooperate use.

The future in the mobile space is going to be all about the eco-system. Not just in app, music, movie and book purchase, but also access to the content you created or bought. Here Google only have Android as a mobile OS to deliver this experience to the costumer. Apple has iOS that are a success on both the mobile and tablet platform, and they have MacOS the desktop OS of the second largest manufacturer of Personal Computers. Microsoft owns the desktop both for the consumer and the business user. They are soon launching Windows 8 that manage to tie together Windows, Xbox Live, Windows Phone and the Windows server platform.

If the future is all about the eco-system, Google is going to have a hard time explaining to their OEM’s why they should stay with Android. Logically none of them can get into the Apple eco-system, but most of them knows the Microsoft eco-system and could easily change. Some of them might even think that it’s better to try something new, and go with WebOS or something else.

The bottom line here is that Google, if they want to stay on top of the mobile OS game, also have to focus on the tablet and desktop experience. They need to get developers to make great apps for tablet Android, kind of like that Google is doing on ChromeOS. I know ChromeOS is dead in the water, but that might just be because it’s a little ahead of its time. They need to make sure that they deliver top-of-class integration into their own services, way better than Apple and Microsoft, and they have to make sure that they or third party developers deliver near perfect integration into the Microsoft server platform. They have to fix the first time user experience and update the UI to better guide the user, and they need to make sure that an Android user can easily get to music, movies and books without having to turn to Amazon and the Kindle Fire. Then Google will be able to stay on as the biggest in the mobile OS arena.

Windows 8 in a tablet world - The love of the IT department

Windows 8 running Excel and a Twitter app

Since Windows 8 was shown at D9 about a month ago I have been wondering where it could take Microsoft and the Windows platform after its release. The way Microsoft have gone about designing Windows 8 there is no dought that they have mobility in mind. That is not surprising since they don't really have a stake in the still growing tablet marked. Tablets are hot right now and tablets are creeping in on one of Microsoft's main markets, the business market.



There are four major operating systems driving today's tablets. iOS is by far the biggest followed by a distant second, Android. The two others are QNX - RIM PlayBook, and WebOS - HP TouchPad. Mabye with the exception of QNX the available tablet OS’s do not have the security build in to let them become an integrated part of almost any larger corporate network. This is a constant annoyance for both the employee and the IT department. The employee sees the advantages of the tablet in a corporate setting and often brings their own iPad’s to work. That puts pressure on the IT department to open up the corporate network to allow the iPad to be used beyond the standard mail and calender sync. This in turn forces the IT department to either open up the network to an insecure and non manageable tablet OS or disappoint a large part of the work force. Neither is very good for any company in the long run
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Windows 8 is build on the Windows 7 platform and have an added layer that is inspired by the Metro interface from Windows Phone. If you were to put Windows 8 on hardware, like say the Asus Transformer with a quad core ARM processor, you would have a perfectly fine tablet, that could easily be used as a notebook on your corporate network. Due to the Metro interface on top it will give you the ease of use that you expect from a tablet, but with the deep integration that is known from Windows.



But are Apple, Google, RIM or HP really going to let Microsoft get in the tablet game that easy? Well Apple does not seem to want to address the needs of the corporate market. They seem to be content with making a great product, mainly for the retail market. Google is all about the cloud, and while this might be the future, there is still a lot of companies that do not want to move their data to cloud just yet. RIM have a good hold on the corporate market, but their phones are starting to look outdated and compared to the latest iPhone or Android phone it just looks like RIM is at the end of their rope. The PlayBook is build on a different OS than the phones and it does not have the securities and deep integration that the BlackBerry OS have. WebOS might be a fine OS, but with the lack of products and apps out there I do not see how is can ever become a real thread to Windows.



So that brings us back to Windows 8. The more I look at it, and the more I look at what type of hardware will be available when Windows 8 hits the markets, the more I see the logic in what Windows 8 is going to be. With Windows 8 Microsoft is not going for the retail market, but they are betting that with the promise of a Windows 7 compatible platform, with a Windows Phone like user interface, the IT departments around the world will embrace Windows 8, and start supplying the corporate work force with Windows 8 based hardware.



With Windows Phone getting the full support from Nokia, and other of the top hardware builders in the market today, and companies like Asus and Acer already promising to build tablets, and everybody else building notebooks, with Windows 8, Microsoft is about to have an ecosystem that is going to be very strong an look very appealing to the corporate players. They will have the mail, calendar and collaboration platform of choice. They will have the apps to make the Metro interface, both on Windows Phone an Windows 8, look interesting enough to bring the average user in. They will, like they have done in the past, make sure that they offer just enough to grab the focus of the IT departments, while still putting enough focus on fun and games to keep the retail market happy. I believe that with Windows 8, Microsoft might just have done it again.