Tag: windows mobile

Equivalency of Everything

Ashlee Vance is mystified by HP’s poor performance in the mobile phone market:

Hewlett-Packard is one of the world’s most successful makers of desktop computers, laptops, servers and printers. It owns a powerful consumer brand, and it is a growing provider of services for businesses. In the first quarter, the company’s sales rose 8 percent.

But in smartphones, H.P. has been on a steady slide into irrelevance.

[…]

Sales of HP’s hand-held products, including its iPaq smartphone, dropped to $25 million in the quarter, down from $57 million in the same period last year. Apple, by contrast, had sales of $5.6 billion for iPhones and related products during its most recent quarter.

HP’s anemic performance in the smartphone market has left analysts perplexed.

Indeed, most analysts tend to use this construction:

  1. Apple is a large computer company
  2. HP is a very large computer company
  3. Apple is making billions selling a mobile phone that doesn’t even have FM radio built in
  4. Q.E.D.: HP should be making even-more-billions selling a mobile phone with FM radio built right in; any other outcome is either an aberration or a mirage, but is clearly not the result of consumer opinion re: HP’s product offerings

The experience of the phones in question just doesn’t enter into it. Ever. That no customer has yet successfully activated that all-important FM radio without being directed step-by-step just isn’t even worth considering. Those are just user errors. Customers want a robust feature check-list at the expense of all other considerations, don’t they? Overall customer satisfaction isn’t something worth wondering after.
HP sells a bunch of commodity hardware running Windows, so they automatically should sell a bunch of commodity hardware running Windows Mobile. That that OS is a well documented train wreck of an operating system, again, just isn’t worth wondering after. It’s got “Windows” in the name, thus people will buy it just as they do the various desktop OSes with “Windows” in the name. Any other outcome is attributed to Apple’s marketing expertise. What else could be responsible? It must be those damned catchy ads. How else do you explain the largest purveyor of Windows Mobile phones, HTC, seeing that segment collapse as Android phone sales on their platforms grow? Again, just Apple and their catchy ads misleading the consumer. After all, it’s called Windows,

Remember, these are professional analysts we’re talking about here.

The article closes with this priceless quote from Phil McKinney, the chief technology officer in H.P.’s personal systems group:

“There is clearly a gap that has opened up for a device that has north of a 3.5-inch screen and less than a 9-inch screen.”

And, unfortunately for HP, that gap’s name is vastly more likely to be iPad than it is to be HP Commodity Doodad, now! with Windows Mobile Classic and a built in FM radio. You know: for kids!

Chauncy Gartner

A series of remarkably uninformed (yet typical) maunderings coming out of the Gartner Group. First, we have:

Google’s Android will have more than quadrupled its market share by the end of 2012, market watcher Gartner has claimed. But Symbian looks set to remain the dominant smartphone OS for several years to come.

Android’s market share stood at a paltry 1.6 per cent during Q1 2009, but will grow to 14.5 per cent by the time Q4 2012 […] The main reason for Android’s market share growth will, Gartner VP Ken Dulaney told website AppleInsider, be because “unlike Apple, they [Google] license their OS to multiple OEMs”.

I see. And it’s also safe to assume that, even with this remarkable and unprecedented market growth, the apologist claims will remain that Android is optimized for the “next” generation of smart phones.

But let’s address the nonsense about OEMs. While that was somewhat true (or at least arguable) for personal computers, it will never be true for phones, or at least not in the near future. Android is at a serious disadvantage precisely because it has to support a panoply of devices, each with its own strengths and weaknesses which each affect the user’s interactions with the phone(s) in unique ways. This is precisely why the iPhone is so polished: Apple has put real effort into making its weaknesses seem normal, or at least liveable and the strengths seem transformative (even when they’re only relatively iterative improvements or even just a fresh coat of paint on a given feature present in other phones). With even a handful of platforms to support, the OS can no longer be tuned in this way…every little quirk or petty slow-down seems like the end of the world, especially when you’re just trying to call Granny or find that photo. Apple’s rapidly growing marketshare with its one and only phone and solitary, much dislike carrier seem to back this up in spades. This is what they’re achieving with AT&T as a partner! Imagine what they could do with dumb pipes.

You’d assume at this point that Gartner, though wrong, would have more or less shot its idiotic claim wad right there. You’d be wrong:

Windows Mobile’s share will grow from 10.3 per cent to 12.8 per cent during the same quarters

How? Windows Mobile 6.5 is universally regarded as a stunning failure, with it’s predecessor being no better (ie, it can’t soldier on for a decade á la XP while Microsoft figures out how to fix it). During the time Microsoft spent developing 6.5 Apple released the iPhone. Three times. Microsoft has no chance. Verizon is aligning with Android, Motorola dropped Microsoft long ago. HTC is hemorrhaging money on the back of Windows Mobile; they’re its largest vendor. If Microsoft/Windows Mobile is even in the top ten of this list come 2012 I will buy and then eat my hat.