LeSving, that graph is very funny.
Even someone with the power, user base, and finances of Microsoft, struggles to even get recognised in the phone/tablet market. What chance has anyone else got.
I would argue that MS failed because they tried to “do an Apple” with a minimalistic user interface but didn’t deliver IOS’s functionality, Apple’s fashionability or the ecosystem (sorry for using that horrible word – it’s like saying “reach out” and “going forward” 
) i.e. the big selection of apps. Yes I know 90++++ % of the stuff in any app shop is useless crap but Apple (and Android, whose app shop is trying hard to catch up with Symbian’s for the % of nonworking crap) are still way ahead of MS.
Without much doubt, if you do a lot of market research today you will discover that most people want a simple easy to use phone, but you do have to deliver all the other stuff too, and Apple had a huge head start. Justine has a WP phone (the Nokia 1020, with the really good camera) and while I would say the “straight out of the box usability” is every bit as good as her previous Iphone4, and she really likes it and much prefers it to the Iphone4 (which BTW often did not receive calls or texts) yesterday we tried to create a waypoint (with a custom name) within the WP Maps (satnav) app but totally failed to find out how. There is a menu in the corner but it’s not in there and the Nokia (Symbian) Maps method of a long press on the current position doesn’t do anything. That is such a basic function in satnav…
In business, it is very hard to enter a market which has a (or two) dominant players. You can always do it by throwing unlimited money at it but will have to throw so much money in that you will never make money overall, so why bother? A lot of business “rules” are trash (unless you go into detail) but the old one about not making money unless you achieve a sizeable (some say “dominant” – I disagree) market share holds true pretty well.
that graph is very funny.
Apart from the collapse of (what looks like – the colours are hard to make out) Symbian, which bit is funny?
I also don’t want to deal with anti virus sw.
If you
you have removed approx 99% of your vulnerability. That, I would argue, puts the risk at or below that of an unprotected OSX and low enough to not matter IF you are using an ISP which AV checks your email (most do nowadays although even Messagelabs let through a .doc attachment the other day. I have never had AV software on any laptop and never got anything nasty, and have a really fast laptop as a result.
I would also argue that the only reason OSX is not getting hit is because Apple is still capitalising on the huge amount of anti-MS sentiment which goes back decades. If Apple lost that, and the world’s hackers decided to go after it instead, the scene would be very different.
You cannot use such an extreme as an argument against a whole company of that size and its products. If that was the standard, you could certainly not buy any Google, Samsung – or any other product on this planet.
The difference is that although Google may well apply the same kinds of restrictions on what you can put on Google Play (their app store), they don’t prevent you from installing software from other sites.
If Apple tries the same thing with MacOS, then I’ll switch to Linux.
They do, which is why I use Windows XP on the desktop
You really should try Windows 7. The best windows since XP, and better than XP in many respects.
Vista was a load of cr*p. Windows 8 is… usable, but confusing.
Apple will soon disintegrate into nothing, just like Nokia.
Not sure what evidence you have to support that argument. Particularly as you mention China. Apple is doing extremely well selling iPhones in China. “For the three months ending in February, Apple’s iOS claimed 27.6 percent of the smartphone market in urban China,” apple-replaces-xiaomi-as-the-top-smartphone-maker-in-china-thanks-to-strong-iphone-sales
You don’t see a problem with Apple arbitrarily deciding what software can or can not be put in the App store?
It actually isn’t that arbitrarily. There are rules and regulations for accepting apps. That there are a handful of controversial decisions about apps that are controversial in itself is hardly surprising. I wouldn’t exactly let my kids watch South Park.
The rules and regulations actually keep the standards of the apps up. Not every nerd can submit an app with a horrible user interface and have it clutter the appstore. I think it really has propelled the quality of the apps into the future. Once you’ve used an iProduct you start to realise how horrible Microsoft is at user interface at times. Or Nokia. HTC even.
I’ve got some old software which doesn’t run on win7.
Win7 is good, but it’s only an OS which is a bit of software for running programs, and if the program runs under XP fine, why change? I have found only a few cases where XP is no good anymore – the latest versions of a few progs like Adobe Lightroom.
Re sideloading of phone apps, one can do it under both Android and IOS, if they are rooted/jailbroken. You just then have to accept that the device must not be updated with the latest OS version i.e. accept that if it works you have to stop messing with it IOW, just like phones always used to be… who ever updated their Nokia 6310i? 
I wouldn’t exactly let my kids watch South Park.
I don’t see how that is relevant, sorry.
The rules and regulations actually keep the standards of the apps up. Not every nerd can submit an app with a horrible user interface and have it clutter the appstore.
Sure. I wouldn’t have a problem with it if you could get apps from other places, but you can’t.
Apart from the collapse of (what looks like – the colours are hard to make out) Symbian, which bit is funny?
The runaway figures for Android – which bear little or no relation to the real world.
The issue is that every single $20 phone coming out of China now runs Android, so the figures look ridiculously high. Many of them don’t even have touchscreens.
If there was a category for ‘proper usable smartphone running Android that someone actually uses as a smartphone’, then the graph would look nothing like that.
It just reinforces the point that statistics can be twisted to prove any point you like. Here’s a fact (equally useless, but that’s kind of the point). In Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year, more Apple devices were ‘Activated’ then Android ones in the US.
That’s where the money is, not in hundreds of millions of disposable phones.
I have the chance to survey the train commuters twice every day. I would guess 80% have a capable touch screen smart phone and ouf them Android is at least 70%.
The pilot community is late with this trend and iOS still holds a rather large share but the same development is happening — evidenced e.g. by our server log files and SkyDemon active users.
Android is the dominant smart phone / tablet platform, no doubt about that.
It just reinforces the point that statistics can be twisted to prove any point you like. Here’s a fact (equally useless, but that’s kind of the point). In Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year, more Apple devices were ‘Activated’ then Android ones in the US.
That’s where the money is, not in hundreds of millions of disposable phones.
Google don’t make money on phones, not even on Android itself. They make money on people using the phones (Android mostly, but others also as long as there are some Google stuff in there).
Europe:
North America:
Interesting to see Blackberry getting so completely wiped out, but then they are roughly where Nokia was when it got caught out with no touch screen phones.
That screwed Nokia totally because by then (c. 2010) most developers deserted them (as they do, without sentiment) for the then current flavour (IOS). On my otherwise really well functioning Nokia 808, I see this because I have
So, the two things most people do on their phone (www and email) don’t really work properly on Symbian Nokias. WP Nokias are a lot better (IE10 and a good email app) but IMHO too little and too late.
One does have to laugh when one realises the Nokia 808 is single core / 600MHz while the latest Samsung S6 is eight-core and 2000MHz That is needed to run the massive bloat overhead in the form of Java, and the hi-res GUI stuff.
On the overall picture, I think Apple will eventually enter a long decline, due to the sheer tonnage of Android phones flooding the entire universe. This will much displease developers because IOS is, from what I hear from a colleague who does this, much easier to write apps for because Android apps don’t work properly on so many devices (partly due to people having not quite the latest OS version) and the developers who care (only the bigger ones) have to buy a big pile of devices to test software on.
