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Posts Tagged ‘market share’

Windows Phone will surpass iPhone in market share in 2015, according to research firm iSuppli.

iSuppli attributes the giant increase in market share over the next few years “largely” to the introduction of the Nokia Lumia 900, which Nokia launched at CES last week in Las Vegas.

In 2015, Android will lead the two runners up by a very hefty margin with 58.1% market share. 

iSuppli joins Gartner and IDC, which made the same prediction last year (in April, and in March, respectively).

See below for the chart from iSuppli, via WMPowerUser:

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This is a guest post from digital marketer Hillel Fuld, you can follow him on Twitter here.

You know Microsoft did SOMETHING right when everyone seems to be talking about the Windows Phone platform. But most people are still pessimistic it’s going to work for Microsoft.

Robert Scoble, for example, dismisses any study that predicts the success of Windows Phone and its eventual triumph over iOS in market share. “It is missing 450,000 apps” is Scoble’s primary argument. That and, “None of my friends are talking about it.”

To Robert and all the other Skeptics who think Microsoft missed the boat and cannot get away from its Windows Mobile reputation, let’s break this down to what a mobile OS needs to succeed, then we can talk about Windows Phone and its chances of success.

I will of course ignore the fact that the majority of the tech press is already rooting for Windows Phone, especially after CES.

Apps: Yes, in today’s mobile world, the name of the game is apps, no question about it. Windows Phone has 50,000 compared to iOS’ 500,000 and Android’s 400,000. Except, that comparison is ridiculous! Windows Phone has been around for one year only and it reached the 50k milestone faster than both iOS and Android. “It’s a different market now then it was back then”? OK, then take 2011 as your measuring stick. Distimo’s end of the year report showed that Windows Phone Marketplace was the fastest growing app store with over 400% growth.

Developers: Well apps don’t grow on trees. Any successful mobile ecosystem needs a serious developer community and guess what? Microsoft has it but it also has all the tools in place to enlarge that community. Last month, I judged an app competition at Microsoft in which iOS and Android developers spent a week porting their apps over to Windows Phone. Some of them were large companies and others were small developers. The one thing they all agreed on was that the development tools/environment of Windows Phone is easier and more efficient than Android by leaps and bounds.

Global Reach: While everyone is busy talking about US market share of iOS vs Android, Nokia is busy selling a million devices a day in places people have never even heard of the iPhone, let alone have the means to afford one. Microsoft joining forces with Nokia, the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones will enable this platform to penetrate markets Apple and Google have not even started to think about. Oh, and in many of these emerging markets, consumers use their mobile phones as their primary computing device, so Nokia has a nice loyal audience over there. Oh, and that very same model of selling mobile phones in volume at a small margin? Yeah, Nokia and Microsoft are bringing that model to the U.S market now.

Hardware: Yes, I know, hardware is so 2010 and all anyone cares about are apps. Except, if that were true, Apple would not have spent all that money developing the hardware and material used in the iPhone. Hardware still matters to some extent and while you can say a lot of things about Nokia and their poor attempt at mobile software, no one makes a phone like Nokia does. The Lumia 900 and its siblings just set the bar for mobile hardware extremely high. Good luck, Samsung.

UI: Let’s be honest, the UI of a mobile OS might be one of the most important factors in its success. Windows Phone, while it still has some bugs to work out and might not have ALL the cool apps just yet, has the most unique UI of any mobile OS since the first iPhone was introduced. The live tiles give you quick access to your information, and the whole Metro UI just works. I believe it was Gruber who said on last month’s On the Verge that if you would go back in time to a decade ago and give someone the choice of iOS, Android, or Windows Phone, many more people would choose the latter than what the market would have you believe. And that is coming from Mr. Apple himself.

The truth is, this is just a partial list and other things Microsoft has going for it include developer incentives in place, a low price point for entry into the US market, and some other goodies like full Office and Xbox support. Not to mention some of the brilliant marketing skills Microsoft is displaying lately.

The bottom line is this. We like to think of this tech and mobile industry as a “Game over” situation with Android and iOS as the clear winners but the truth is, this space is in its diapers and what the market looks like now will in no way resemble the mobile market of 2015, so lets not declare Windows Phone dead just yet.

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Is Pandora really struggling to monetize its increasing popular mobile service?

We asked Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy to explain how the company is managing the shift from desktop to mobile devices, and how much money Pandora can really make while radio advertising in general is failing.

Watch the clip below from our IGNITION conference.

Produced by Kamelia Angelova, Robert Libetti and Daniel Goodman

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Last week, Google decided to renew its search bar partnership with Mozilla, effectively keeping Chrome’s main competitor, Firefox, in business.

Why did Google do it?

The answer seems simple enough: Google renewed its partnership with Mozilla so Microsoft couldn’t swoop in and make Bing the default search engine of choice for Firefox.

But maybe there’s more to the story.

Chrome engineer Peter Kasting took to Google+ to “rant” about how misunderstood the transaction really is.

ReadWriteWeb picked up on Kasting’s post, which claims that in “funding” Mozilla, Google is “funding a partner,” and not a competitor.

Kasting adds that “the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible.”

“It’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done.”

Do you buy it?

Kasting goes on to say that “Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well.”

Ultimately, it seems that the success of Firefox is really about ad dollars and driving users to Google, regardless of the “let’s be friends” layer on top of the transaction.

“Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds,” Kasting said. “Chrome doesn’t need to be a Microsoft Office, a direct money-maker.”

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Earlier today, Google and Mozilla renewed their deal to make Google the default search engine in the Firefox browser for another three years.

This seems like Microsoft passed up a great opportunity to get more traffic to Bing.

Right now, Firefox has about 25% market share and is used by more than 400 million people. According to Comscore, about 75% of the searches conducted from Firefox go to Google. (Users can manually select Bing or another search engine, but most don’t.)

Last year, Google paid Mozilla about $103 million for the right to be the default search engine. (That’s 84% of the Mozilla Foundation’s total $123 million, as per its 2010 financial statement, which were released in October — PDF here.)

That’s chump change for Microsoft. Even if the deal was much more expensive this time around as both companies bid up the price, Microsoft blinked first.

Why?

Microsoft had no comment, but here’s one possibility: Microsoft has already reached its market share goal with Bing and is tightening the wallet to bring expenses under control.

The evidence:

• Microsoft said 30% market share was its goal. Back in 2007, the leader of the Online business, Kevin Johnson, talked several times about the company’s “10-20-30-40″ plan for Online. The “30″ stood for 30% market share for Bing. At the time, this seemed outlandish, but the following year Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo, and after that failed, it eventually managed to strike a search deal with the company. Combined, Bing and Yahoo have been at more than 30% share in the U.S. since spring. Mission accomplished!

• Microsoft decreased Bing’s marketing spend last quarter. The Online group’s operating loss decreased for the first time in ages last quarter. That’s partly because sales and marketing expenses for the Online group dropped 25% last quarter (compared with the year-ago quarter). That’s a big shift from the previous four quarters, where sales and marketing expenses for Online rose 5% from the previous year.

• It’s letting Bing talent migrate. Back in April, a former Bing engineer wrote that Microsoft was no longer spending big bucks to retain the best talent — instead, it was paying “far below market rates.” This year, two top Bing leaders — Satya Nadella and Yusuf Mehdi — took jobs elsewhere at Microsoft, suggesting that they saw more opportunity elsewhere (or that Steve Ballmer wanted to shift top talent away from Bing).

There may be other reasons why Microsoft let Google win this one as well — in particular, Firefox competes with Internet Explorer, which is part of Microsoft’s most important product, Windows.

But let’s face it: search is Google’s core business. For Microsoft, it’s always been an (expensive) defensive play.

Pay attention to the next few quarters. If Bing’s market share stays stable and Microsoft continues to cut its expenses, then we’ll know that the company is happy (enough) with where Bing is now, and has shifted its spend and attention to much more important markets where it’s getting creamed, like smartphones and tablets.

If that proves to be the case, that’s great news for Microsoft investors.

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See Also:

• THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Google Still Dominating Search And It’s Now Winning The Browser Race
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