Comments on: Behind Google's FUD campaign against Apple

The company counts noses and on paper, at least, the numbers of potential Android customers outstrips the potential number of iPhone users. Or so Google argues.

[jbelkin]

First comment can be safely because it's just an MS employee realizing that in 5 years, MS might be a division of GE & leading in embedded OSes in wedding registry kioks and jiffy lube terminals while Apple leads in market share with consumers garnering full margins.

The other part is Google success depends on Motorola, Nokia & Samsung writing phone apps and an OS that is not idiotic ... tall oder for 3 companies (and others) who STARTED the industry amnd twiddled their thumbs for TWENTY years and had their lunch handed to them in 7 months. I believe idiots is the perfect description. Were their products successful? Sure, at a 90% discount ... any Apple products sell at a 90% discount? Any Apple products require you to sign a contract to buy at 90% off?

That's who Google is partnered with. Plus while Goog;e's search front page is a bastion of simplicity and clearly the best search on EArth (I'm not disrepecting them) but look at their "MORE" page - you think Apple would put up such a page?

Will Android and the other phone manufacturers do fine - of course, there is still a mass market looking for cheap discounted phones but right now, there is only one company who can sell EVERY phone at FULL MARGIN and the SDK changes nothing. Even RIm sells at a discount.

Apple is not interested in being the 40% market share leader of discounted phones where they make a few dollars - Apple just wants 80% of the FULL MARGIN market ... and Android doesn't come close because while this guy is talking about features, how you get it on the phone and if it's usable, that's TWO different stories.

Companies have been battling the ipod for 6 years and still don't realize - it's NOT the features - it's the design and the UI. Who will win there? You want to bet against Apple?

[jameskatt]

As an Apple shareholder (owner), I think Apple is doing fantastically and has a great strategy. Kudos to Steve Jobs.

Apple doesn't care so much about overall marketshare for the iPhone. That would be competing with very cheap phones, which do nothing like what the iPhone can do. Rather, Apple wants to get the cream of the crop consumer - the ones who make Apple a fat profit for each iPhone sold. This consumer makes up about 5 percent of the mobile phone market. Apple is already on track to surpass its goals of this market and threatens to completely take over - just like the iPods do in the music device player market.

Apple is not interested in selling as many mobile phones as Nokia does. Apple is a huge profit making machine. It can do so by selling much fewer phones than Nokia. And Nokia will be jealous. Despite having only 3 percent of the PC Market, Apple makes 25% of Microsoft's profits! Its stores making more money per square foot than Tiffany's or any other company. Apple is a money making monster. I love it.

[mister_moon]

The phone is not relevant. Nobody uses their phone to make calls. It's a mobile PC. If the phone part fails Apple have got something to fall back on....google and the others still don't get it. Apple are 10 years ahead when it comes to planning and implementing their mobile PC strategy.

[Kontracnet]

Absolutely, it takes much more than an SDK to make a mobile platform successful. I examined 10 factors that put Apple in an unassailable position in the mobile platform wars and reviewed the weaknesses of iPhone competitors in:

Who can beat iPhone 2.0?
http://counternotions.com/2008/03/10/iphone2-competitors/

[Jay Godse]

Android will beat iPhone in market penetration for the same reason that the PC beat the Mac. They are using an open software platform that will be able to run on a variety of hardware platforms, many of which are much more widely deployed than the iPhone.

The other reason that Android will win is because Google Gears with its cell-phone resident database (SQLite) will enable users to store their data locally and have it automatically syncrhonized and backed up in Google's infrastructure. As more and more applications need data stored on the phone itself, having an automatic backup and synchronization will become more & more important.

Having said that, the iPhone SDK also has SQLite in it. Apple would do well to provide some sort of network storage & backup for data on iPhones, and maybe make that API or software available to applications developers. Perhaps even Google Gears on iPhone would give iPhones the network backed storage. (Dr Schmidt's presence on the boards of Apple & Google could help that along :).

Having said all that though, I think Android will win, but that netwrok-backed storage is a great value over time.

[geo11101]

Eric Schmidt is the biggest Mafia puppet in the US. He is bad news for apple users. http://endmafia.com