Some new numbers have been released showing that Android has picked up a staggering 7% absolute points (26% market share in November 2010 and 33% share in February 2011) of market share in the past 3 months. That’s a whopping 27% increase. If I was a brand manager, I would take a 27% share growth any day, thank you very much.
As I’ve mentioned before, Apple and its iPhone get all the hype from the fan boys, however Apple once again is fighting and losing the exact same battle as it did in the 1980’s and 1990’s
Apple is fighting a very similar war to the one it fought–and lost–in the 1990s. It is trying to build the best integrated products, hardware and software, and maintain complete control over the ecosystem around them. This end-to-end control makes it easier for Apple to build products that are “better,” but it makes it much harder for the company to compete against a software platform that is standard across many hardware manufacturers Windows in the 1990s, Android now.
As the SAI article I’ve quoted notes, I would have to agree that Apple and the others in the mobile space (RIM, Windows) need to really consider the implications here.
My mobile contract on Verizon is up in July and while Verizon now has the iPhone, and I have recently acquired other Apple products like iPad and iPad 2, I have to say that I am pretty reticent to switch over to iPhone for my mobile device. The flexibility of the Android phone is something that I’m not ready to give up yet, and I get the sense from these numbers that others are feeling the same way.
via SAI.