Tag: motorola

No, Google is not going 'horizontal' by selling Motorola

Another excellent move by Google: Offload Motorola Mobile Devices to Lenovo, while keeping the patents to themselves.

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Skimming through the news this morning, I found there is apparently a lot of confusion about the planned sale of Motorola by Google. From decrying a huge loss by Google by such infotainment sites like Wired and Slate, to seeing Google giving up on copying vertical integration of Apple (hardware + software + services), like Stratechery by Ben Thomson.

Let’s look at things from a broader perspective. The acquisition of Motorola was necessary to protect Android, after Apple, Microsoft and BlackBerry outbid Google for Nortel patents. The Apple-Microsoft-BlackBerry trio made it very clear that they intend to put a drag on then-fledging Android ecosystem and extort royalties from Android OEMs. The cost of doing nothing was huge for Google – just think how much more nasty the patent wars may have turned out for Android if the acquisition hadn’t taken place. Any “profit and loss” analysis of the Motorola deal must account for the opportunity cost associated with Motorola patents. Android is, was and will be critically important for Google’s core online ad business, as I will explain in a bit. Continue reading No, Google is not going 'horizontal' by selling Motorola

The elusive long-tail of mobile shipments

[The era of smartphones is upon us, as penetration increases from 11% in 2008 to over 25% in 2011. But what of the remaining three quarters of the market? Marketing Manager Matos Kapetanakis talks smartphone numbers and takes a look at the elusive long-tail of feature phone shipments]

100 Million Club - H1 2011 - Handset OEMs vs. Platforms

Dawn of the smartphone era

Smartphone penetration continues to accelerate, growing from a paltry 11% in 2008 to 20% in 2010 and climbing to 27% in H1 2011. Feature phones continue to make up the bulk of mobile shipments globally, but the revenue potential of each segment is a different matter altogether. As an example, the average selling price for Nokia’s feature phones was 39 Euros versus 144.5 Euros for their converged devices.

Another parameter, namely profitability is much in favour of smartphone vendors. HTC has comparable revenues to Nokia’s successful feature phone segment, with two times the profits and profit margin, despite having six times fewer shipments. The gap is even larger in the case of Apple, whose profits are nearly 20 times those of Nokia’s feature phone segment, despite having less than a third of Nokia’s shipments.

Smartphone platforms: Google vs. Apple

First, let’s take a look at the two leading players, Android and iOS. The vacuum left behind by Symbian’s timely demise has been filled primarily by Android and, to a lesser extend, Apple’s iOS. In H1 2011, Android gobbled up nearly 45% of the smartphone pie, leaving approximately 20% for Apple’s iOS and 12% for RIM’s BlackBerry OS.

Apple has enjoyed a healthy increase of iPhone shipments in 2011, already reaching past the 50M full-year figure for 2010 in the first three quarters of 2011. Despite the initial disappointment of not being a brand-new iPhone, the iPhone 4S managed to get 4 million sales in just one weekend – that’s more than Windows Phone manages in an entire quarter. However, in an increasingly price sensitive smartphone market, there is a limit to how many iPhones can be sold.

Despite being the number one smartphone platform, Android is not guaranteed a smooth sailing. Apple’s lawsuit barrage on Samsung, the biggest Android vendor in terms of sales, has exposed the platform’s Achilles’ heel, namely patents. The large arena of this high-stake drama will not be set in Germany or Australia, but the large smartphone markets, like the U.S. Google’s acquisition of Motorola (don’t miss our full analysis) has indeed armed Google with fresh patent ammunition, but might alienate the big Android vendors.

Smartphone platforms: The best of the rest

But what of the other platforms? Windows Phone continues to fail to impress users, with sales being disappointing, as Ballmer himself recently admitted. Nearly eight months after the much-vaunted Microsoft-Nokia deal, Windows Phone is faced with lukewarm results, being outsold even by Samsung’s bada platform. In H1 2011, Windows Phone barely reached 4M shipments, while bada shipments climbed to nearly 8M. WP7’s growth, after it replaces the zombified Symbian as Nokia’s main smartphone platform, is still uncertain, but the longer it takes for Nokia WP devices to hit the shelves, the more market share will Nokia lose. In H1, even if Nokia were to magically replace all Symbian handsets with Windows Phone handsets, Microsoft’s platform would still be far behind Android, with just half of Android’s shipments.

Windows Phone, however, should not be summarily disregarded, as Microsoft has managed to create a substantial ecosystem around the platform, which is the main ingredient to the success of Apple and Google. Windows Marketplace reached the 30 thousand apps milestone in just 10 months, while the platform has received positive reviews by developers. The platform is widely acknowledged as having the best developer tools in terms of features, based on our Developer Economics 2011 report (www.DeveloperEconomics.com).

Even though Stephen Elop described the smartphone market as a three-horse race, there is another important player to be considered, namely RIM. During the past year, RIM has suffered a number of blows, from declining market share and repeated drops in their share price to a total service blackout that lasted four days. RIM is starting to lag behind its competitors and their leaking market share is up for grabs. Despite a vibrant developer community, problems such as fragmentation issues and an aging platform have cost RIM the creation of a healthy ecosystem. A telling sign is how BlackBerry App World is lagging behind not only Apple and Google’s app stores in terms of available apps and downloads, but also Nokia’s Ovi Store. Now, the BlackBerry blackout fiasco has cost RIM the confidence of 70M subscribers. RIM is on the verge of relinquishing their last remaining competitive advantage, namely reliability. Even though RIM is trying to turn the situation around, with the introduction of the BBX platform, plus the carrot of Android apps compatibility in the second version of Playbook, it’s the RIM brand that has taken a beating, more than the BlackBerry brand. It remains to be seen whether users will flock to the notoriously unsafe Android platform or will opt to follow the safer, iPhone route. The iPhone route seems more suitable to RIM’s enterprise segment, as the segment’s disposable income is enough to carry the weight of expensive iPhones.

Smartphone vendor arena

In H1 2011, Apple and Samsung toppled Nokia as the undisputed king of smartphones. The top-5 smartphone vendor rankings also include RIM and HTC. It’s no surprise that 3 out of the top 5 players are purely smartphone vendors; but the old guard is catching up.

VisionMobile - 100 MC - H1 2011 - Mobile market share by OEM

Although lagging behind, LG is finally on board the smartphone express, while Sony Ericsson has disowned their feature phone heritage and plan to become a smartphone-only vendor in 2012. As smartphone prices are dropping, ZTE and Huawei are also firmly in the game, extending well past their native home market.

It’s interesting to note that in a market of 208 million smartphones in H1 2011, there are very few dark horses. The top 10 players accounted for nearly all smartphone shipments in the first half of 2011, leaving just 3% of shipments in the ‘other’ category.

 

The elusive long-tail of mobile shipments

While Nokia has lost the pole position in the smartphone market, it continues to firmly hold the feature phone market in its grasp. Nokia accounted for over 27% of total feature phone shipments in H1 2011, followed by Samsung with 20% and LG with 7%.

However, the feature phone market is extremely fragmented, with the top 7 players accounting for just 64% of shipments. The remaining x% belongs to the generic ‘other’ category. But what is this dark, elusive gap in the market? The answer lies in the plethora of primarily Asian phone manufacturers out there (see a slightly out-of-date list here), taking off-the-shelf MediaTek hardware designs to create Shanzai handsets for the Chinese market or brand name handsets for India.

VisionMobile - 100 Million Club - Feature phone market share H1 2011

The long tail of feature phone manufacturers largely caters to local markets, in partnerships with local telcos. India and China are the obvious examples of low-volume feature phone manufacturers, with each country playing host to over 15 such companies. With tens of companies shipping low-end devices to local markets, it’s small wonder that the biggest bulk of feature phone shipments comes from the long-tail of handset OEMs.

The end of feature phones

While smartphone penetration continues to increase, just over 1 in 4 mobile phones are smartphones. The tipping point will come when handset OEMs manage to release low-cost smartphones into the market, in high volumes. Google is already attempting to sell cheap smartphones in the range of $100 unsubsidized, pre-tax. The rate of acceleration will increase even further if there is any truth to the rumors of cheaper iPhones, as consumers are still hesitant of the prices that Apple demands for its products.

Furthermore, most major handset OEMs are keen to lower the volume of feature phone offers in favor of smartphones, as the latter have a much higher profit margin and the market is slowly getting accustomed to the use of touch screens.

Questions or comments? Drop us a line on Twitter.

Download the full 100 Million Club watchlist.

– Matos

The post-Motorola dilemma: Same old-Google or the new Apple?

[Google’s pending acquisition of Motorola creates a dilemma: Google must choose between staying true to its core business or reshaping into the new vertical giant that will challenge Apple at its own game. Research Director Andreas Constantinou discusses Google’s dilemma and why both outcomes stand to radically change the rules of the Android Empire]

The post-Motorola dilemma: Same old-Google or the new Apple?

Google’s forthcoming acquisition of Motorola for $12.5B has been largely dubbed a patent deal. And it is. But beyond the patents, Google faces a fundamental dilemma for its core business, and one that will determine the future of the Android Empire.

In mid-August Google announced it intends to buy Motorola Mobility Holdings (MMI), which includes the mobile phone, set top box and DVR businesses, for $12.5B. The true cost to Google is much less though, given that MMI has cash and accrued tax benefits. The move has seen an unprecedented amount of analysis in the blogosphere, with a fair amount of guesswork as to what Google’s motivations were in buying a hardware company.

We believe that Motorola’s acquisition is not just about patents. The move marks a major turning point in how Google runs the Android Empire. Let’s see why.

 

The post-Motorola dilemma

We believe that the Motorola acquisition was sold to the Google board as a patent deal, with the hardware business being an unwanted but inseparable part of the package.

Now Google faces a fundamental dilemma. The combination of Google and Motorola is like building a skyscraper in the middle of the ocean; the two companies are built on very different business models.

Google is a profitable, 28,000-strong direct marketing company. Google uses Android as a platform with which to commoditise mobile handsets, flatten network access and reach billions more consumer eyeballs.

Motorola, on the other hand, is an unprofitable, 19,000-strong hardware company, one that uses Android as a ticket to sell more hardware to more consumers and more carriers in the form of smartphones.

We have no doubt that Google will divest a large part of the Motorola business. A hardware business would not help Google sell more ads, i.e. drive its core business.

Motorola accounts for less than 10% of Android devices sold in Q2 2011 – third after Samsung and HTC who shipped 18 million and 11 million Android devices, respectively, according to data from Gartner and Arete. By fully incorporating Motorola, Google would be just nudging forward Android device sales, while at the same time upsetting all of its major OEM partners. In other words, incorporating Motorola would have the same market impact as buying a local network carrier.

The question then is which parts of Motorola Google plans to keep, besides the patents. This presents a major strategy dilemma for Google – and one whose outcome will have fundamental impact on how Google runs the Android Empire.

 

Android as a software autocracy

Motorola’s IPR portfolio is substantial: 15,000 wireless patents, another 6,200 pending, and 3,000 granted or pending patents in the Home division, according to Arete research. More importantly, Motorola has a host of essential (blocking) patents around GSM.

These patents buy an Android Insurance Policy that Google can issue to “compliant” OEMs that are intended to protect these OEMs from “patent taxes” levied by Microsoft, Nokia and others. This Insurance Policy is essential to protect the vast Android handset population from stalling its so-far phenomenal growth. At the same time, this insurance policy is not sufficient if Apple does attack the mid-priced smartphone segment, as it is rumoured to do.

Android has been built on very shaky legal grounds, heavily “borrowing” from the Java language, the Java SE APIs and integrating with copious amounts of GPL-licensed code. Contrast that with how iOS, Symbian and Windows Phone platforms were built from scratch with very little inbound software licensing above the kernel. In other words, Google is buying Motorola to remedy the lack of IP strategy that threatens to undo 5 years of software craftsmanship. Google is paying for its past sins.

Moreover, the Motorola patent portfolio is comparable to Nokia’s, which not only buys Google insurance but puts Apple and Microsoft on the defensive – see the outcome of the Apple-Nokia patent dispute in which Apple has to pay Nokia 8 EUR per iPhone sold in the future, in addition to a substantial one-off payment.

But beyond the Android Insurance Policy, Google is getting something much more important: it strengthens the Android software dictatorship.

As we discussed here and here Google licenses the Android platform under an open source license but uses several control points to incentivise OEMs to stick to a tight software implementation (and one that goes way beyond APIs). Google’s Schmidt explains eloquently how “OEMs feel like they have a choice” with how they implement Android  [see video segment starting at 28m 50s] but in fact, they have to comply with Google’s requirements as they need G’s permission to add Android market and use the relevant trademarks on their handsets.

What patents buy by extension is practically a software autocracy; Google is now going to extend its Android Insurance Policy only to compliant OEMs. This means that if an OEM doesn’t follow Google’s precise software requirements, they will be prey to patent taxes by Google competitors. This now makes it untenable for an OEM to not pass Google’s Android certification.

 

Android as an Experience Licensing business

Besides software, there is a great deal of value that Google can leverage from Motorola. But that means a substantial change to Google’s business model.

Google’s business strategy is based on the economics of complements – that is, if you want to sell more cars, you need to lower the price of gas.

In Google’s case, if you want to sell more ads, you need to lower the prices of smartphones (Android), commoditise the networks (GTalk, Google Voice) and advance the state of web browsers (Chrome). Notice how everything complementary to Google’s business is “open”, while everything core to Google’s business is closed (Adwords, Android Market, Google Maps)

The Google strategy is to make Android smartphones as ubiquitous and as cheap as possible, with the lowest possible barriers to entry for OEMs and ODMs, so that the last citizen on Earth can be exposed to Google inventory.

However, the trouble with Android is that it has turned into a price-driven battlefield. The vast majority of devices compromise on the industry design and experience with cheap me-too plastics and poorly tested OEM apps and UI overlay. So far Android has managed to grow impressively fast as most devices are well below the iPhone and iPad price points. But with Apple rumoured to be releasing a lower-priced phone design, we expect Google’s empire of Android me-too clones to be challenged by the integrated, consistent and entwined experience that Apple offers.

This is where Motorola comes in. To counter Apple mid-priced phones, Google needs to tightly define and control the experience delivered on OEM licensee phones.

In this scenario, Google would use Motorola’s design teams to develop a complete “reference experience” that encompasses industrial design, hardware specs, complete software specs, marketing specs, pricing norms and of course the Google app suite. The Android open source “take it and fork it” mantra becomes much closer to a contractually enforced “experience licensing” business, in which OEMs that choose Android can compete with Apple on the same level, and get guaranteed margins through Google’s contractually-specified boundaries for Android handsets. How are OEMs going to differentiate you ask? Through regional marketing deals, retailer agreements and pre-loads with local service providers that deliver an additional rev share.

We envisage Android’s Experience Licensing scenario as borrowing heavily from the franchise business model widely practiced in the retail industry.  In franchise stores, the experience is as tightly controlled as the products, the marketing strategy and the pricing policy.

In other words, Experience Licensing is about running the Android Empire with Apple’s grip.

To accomplish this strategy, Google needs to seed the market with “Hero” devices that epitomize the Android experience. Here is where Google can leverage on Motorola’s device production assets.

A quick backgrounder: so far, Google has designed Android to offer three types of handset projects: Experience handsets (based on Google specs and branding), Partner handsets (compliant with Google’s Android specs, but with no Google involvement or branding) and DIY handsets (take the source code and fork it, but you ‘re on your own, e.g. China Mobile’s oPhone). The purpose of Experience handsets is to advance the state of the platform, by working closely with 2 pre-selected OEMs 6-9 months prior to the public release of the codebase under an open source license. Experience handsets (see full list here) are run under tight Google control and co-marketed by both Google and the OEM.

Google would be adding “Hero” handsets to the existing three tiers, which delivers two benefits.

Firstly, it allows Google to divide and conquer among OEMs without giving anyone “special privileges” or know how – it is rumoured for example that Google has been unhappy with the know-how HTC developed as a result of their long-standing relationship in the early Android days which has given HTC the fastest time-to-market for handsets based on the public codebase (note how HTC is no longer involved in Experience handsets for some time).

Secondly, it allows Google to better compete for carrier deals with Apple, by offering carriers exclusive access to the latest and best Android features on Motorola hardware. As we know, carriers die for exclusives, so rather than run Motorola device business at cost, Google can just keep the crown jewel features for carrier-exclusives from Motorola.

 

Redefining how Google runs the Android Empire

The purchase of Motorola makes Google the emperor of the Android Empire. Whichever parts of Motorola Google decides to keep, the laws of the Empire would be irreversibly changed. The how depends on which scenario Google opts for.

1. In the software dictatorship scenario (which we take as the default option), Google would make it untenable for OEMs not to follow its software specifications to the letter or to fork Android. Google stays true to its core ad business and divests everything apart from patents to a Taiwanese OEM wanting to break into the North America market.

2. In the Experience Licensing scenario, Google keeps the hardware design and device production capabilities to allow Android to compete head-to-head on every Apple price points, both the current high-end iPhone/iPad pricing and the rumoured mid-tier pricing. Here Google would have to take a hit on its cash flows and profitability by putting its hand deep in its pocket (both in terms of CAPEX and OPEX) to more favourably compete with Apple.

Irrespective of Google’s mobile plans, the Motorola acquisition offers the search giant a means to control the hardware and software make up of set-top boxes and offer a similar licensing program to Android TV licensees. We know that the first attempt at Android TV failed because there was very little premium content as content producers were concerned with DRM and content security. By controlling the hardware and software specs for Android TV, Google could bring the content producers back on board.

Historically, Apple has been fundamental to the success of Android. As it turns out, it is going to fundamentally challenge the Android business.

Stephen Elop noted in June 2011 that “Apple created the conditions necessary for Android”, by incentivizing carriers and OEMs to offer iPhone-killers at less than profit-killing prices.

Now Apple is creating the conditions necessary to challenge Android’s growth, by milking Android OEMs for patent taxes and challenging the Android clone empire with unique product experiences at more price points.

Whatever route Google chooses to take, it will fundamentally change the rules of the Android Empire.

– Andreas
you should follow me on Twitter: @andreascon

[Mystified by the intricacies of Google’s  Android strategy? Check out our Android Game Plan workshop!]

The mobile services landscape: Can OEMs compete with platform vendors?

[Growing competition and price pressures push handset makers to seek new ways to differentiate. This increasingly means services. VisionMobile Research Partner Michael Vakulenko compares service offerings of leading handset makers, explaining why OEMs will struggle to create meaningful differentiation through services.]

VisionMobile - The mobile services landscape

Remember the Motorola RAZR or the Nokia N95? Long gone are the days when handset hardware was fertile ground for innovation and differentiation. Convergence of device form-factors and equal access to advanced chipset technology pushes the handset market to the brink of deep commoditization.

Focus on smartphones can only provide short-term life support for deteriorating margins. Android opened the floodgates to low-cost assemblers to compete in the smartphone market. Aggressive new-comers, like ZTE, Huawei, Acer and Dell, along with a growing list of previously unknown handset manufacturers, push incumbents deeper and deeper into the commoditisation corner. Differentiation based on services increasingly looks like an attractive solution for many handset OEMs.

Services, services, services
Let’s look at how service offerings of leading handset OEMs stack up against each other. Nokia, Samsung, Apple, RIM, HTC, Motorola and Sony Ericsson (in no particular order) all have service ambitions and will be the subjects of the comparison.

State-of-the-art service offerings go far beyond much-hyped application stores. We ‘ll dig into the following service categories:

– Content retailing services: App stores, music, premium video and billing.
– Cloud services: Cloud-based contact book, cloud synchronization/backup, and device management (i.e. location tracking and remote lock).
– Communication services: Email services (e.g. gmail.com, me.com or nokia.com), instant messaging and video conferencing services
– Location-based services: Maps and navigation
– Advertising: Ownership of an ad network, display ads, multimedia ads and location-based ads.

Since many of the OEMs use Google Android and Windows Phone 7 platforms, we ‘ll also compare OEM service offerings with the ‘native’ services of the platforms.

The table below compares service offerings of different OEMs, as well as smartphone platforms across the above service categories.

VisionMobile - handset manufacturer services

The Leader: Apple
Apple, as usual, is in a league of its own. Apple has an extensive set of services anchored in the well-oiled iTunes content machine and MobileMe cloud services. One glaring omission is location-based services. For now, Apple has to rely on an uncomfortable partnership with Google Maps. There are persistent rumors that Apple develops its own location and mapping services (here and here). We can expect that sooner or later Apple will find its way out of its dependency on Google Maps, launching its own location-based services.

Challengers: Nokia, RIM
The next group of companies are the challengers – Nokia and RIM. Both use integrated models similar to Apple’s, combining proprietary software platforms with proprietary hardware (for now I will ignore the big unknowns of the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft).

Nokia has a comprehensive service portfolio, even compared to Apple. It ranges from the quintessential app store and music service all the way to location-based services and its own ad network. However, Nokia’s execution was weak and the future of Nokia’s services is up in the air following announced the partnership with Microsoft.

In contrast, RIM has a sketchy service portfolio, focused on its best-in-class messaging services. These include push-email, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), in addition to the mandatory app store. It looks like RIM continues to focus on hardware and its new QNX operating system. For now, service-based innovation outside messaging takes a back seat for the BlackBerry platform.

Wannabes: Samsung, HTC, Sony-Ericsson and Motorola
Finally, Samsung, HTC, Sony-Ericsson and Motorola are OEMs building smartphones based on the Android and, in some cases, Windows Phone software platforms (Samsung also owns the bada software platform).

While Motorola is strong in cloud services with its MOTOBLUR service, Samsung leads the way in content. The Samsung offer includes music downloads and movie services, bundled with the popular line of Galaxy smartphones and tablets. Due to the licensing terms of content owners, content services have a limited geographical footprint, being available only in North America and Europe.

Overall, the services offering is very mixed for these vendors with piecemeal solutions mostly focused on content and cloud sync services.

Platforms: Android and Windows Phone
Unsurprisingly, Android and Windows Phone offer a comprehensive set of ‘native’ services across all service categories. Google Android is weak in content services compared to Apple and even Windows Phone, but compensates with leading-edge location-based services and a comprehensive ad offering. Windows Phone ‘native’ services leverage Microsoft’s Bing, Live, Zune and Xbox assets having millions of active users.

These ‘native’ services form the basis for platform differentiation and user value proposition for both platforms.

OEMs will struggle to make impact with services
Out of these handset OEMs, only Apple and Nokia come close to the breadth and scale of service offerings provided by platform vendors. It’s really difficult to see how Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson and Motorola can create highly differentiating services on the Android or Windows Phone platforms. For them, services will not become a solution for the upcoming wave of commoditization.

Dependency on 3rd party software platforms, lack of scale for making meaningful content deals, conflict of interests with operators and incompatible company DNA will make it extremely difficult for handset OEMs to make an impact with services.

In the words of Nokia’s CEO “Devices are not enough anymore”. No, this quote was not one of Stephen Elop’s, taken from the recent “burning platform” memo – it comes from a speechmadebackin 2007, by then NokiaCEO,Olli–PekkaKallasvuo. Nokia realized early that services will play a critical role in handset value proposition. The Finnish OEM has tried hard to reinvent itself and become a hardware+services company.

The rest is history. Nokia found it nearly impossible to reconcile the DNA of a hardware company, which “lives” by device release cycles, with the DNA of a service company that “lives” by developing long term relationships with users, developers and partner ecosystems. If Nokia failed to do so with their vast resources and enviable volume leadership, what are the chances that Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson or Motorola will manage it?

– Michael

Connect with us on Twitter for more updates

[Michael Vakulenko is a Research Partner at VisionMobile. He has been working in the mobile industry for over 16 years, starting his career in wireless in Qualcomm. Michael has a broad experience across many aspects of the mobile industry, including smartphone ecosystems, mobile services, handset software, wireless chipsets and network infrastructure. He can be reached at michael [/at/] visionmobile.com]

The Android Monopoly and how to harness it

[Behind Android’s stellar success is a love and hate relationship with handset vendors. Android is a critical launchpad for PC-borne OEMs like Dell and Acer, but a short-term life support for mobile vendor incumbents like Sony Ericsson and Motorola. Research Director Andreas Constantinou looks at how OEMs can leverage on virtualisation to get the best of both worlds with Android; the burgeoning app ecosystem, but without Google’s lock down of experience differentiation]

VisionMobile blog - The Android Monopoly and how to harness it

From an underdog to ubiquitous manufacturer support, the Android platform has come a long way since its introduction in 2008. Almost every single device vendor (except for Apple and Nokia) has launched Android devices, while Sony Ericsson and Motorola are betting their margins and future on it.  The phenomenal rally behind Android is – in a nutshell – due to 4 factors: the operator demand for a cheaper iPhone, the burgeoning Android developer community, Android’s market readiness (3 months to launch a new handset) and the ability to differentiate on top of the platform.

A monopolist on the rise?
Year after year, Android keeps on surprising industry pundits. Google’s software platform saw 100% quarter-on-quarter increase in the first 3 quarters of 2010. The last quarter of 2010 saw Android go chest-to-chest with Nokia in terms of smartphone shipments, in what CEO Stephen Elop called ‘unbelievable’. With such meteoric rise, analysts are beginning to talk about a potential Android monopoly in the future market of smartphones, contested only by the Nokia-backed Windows Phone.

The Google commoditization endgame
Is Google the biggest benefactor the industry has seen? Not by a long way.

Google runs a hugely successful advertising business and needs to bring as many eyeballs as it can onto its ad network. To this end, Google’s agenda is to commoditise handsets by forcing smartphone prices down (see our analysis on the $100 Android phone) and having its ad network deployed on the broadest possible number of smartphones (via closed apps like GMaps and Gmail).
Moreover, Google’s agenda is to commoditise mobile networks by flattening the mobile termination barriers and removing volume-based price plans that telcos have traditionally built.
At a 10,000 ft level, Google’s strategy is based on deceptively simple microeconomics principle; to drive up the value of its core business (ad network) it needs to commoditise the complements (devices, networks and browsers).

Android as the centre of a 5-sided network

Naturally Google is hermetically closed in all aspects of its core business. The Android Market, GMaps, Gmail, GTalk are ‘closed source’ and the Android trademark is commercially licensed. This means that while Android is open source, Google uses the Android Market and trademark to enforce strict compliance of Android handsets to Google’s CDD and CTS specifications. See our earlier analysis on Android’s hidden control points for how Google runs the show.

So Google is by no means a benevolent benefactor. Like any other company out there, it’s in it for the money; a rationally-driven business of the platform era, out to commoditise the mobile handset business with a free-for-all carrot.

Winners and losers of the Android game
For handset manufacturers, Android is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it offers OEMs a low-cost-base, rapid time-to-market platform from which to build differentiated designs. This is manna from heaven for PC-borne assemblers who use Android as the pier from where they can gain firstly a foothold in mobile and secondly global reach.

At the same time it’s a curse; Google’s control of Android compliance means that it deprives OEMs of all points of differentiation: user interface, hardware features and industrial design – except for (you guessed it!) price. Which means that with Google defining the Android experience, there’s little differentiating a Sony Ericsson handset from an Acer handset. With Acer happily operating at 3% profit margins, Android is to Motorola and Sony Ericsson just a short-term life support.

OEM + Android - Winners & Losers

Nokia too evaluated Android before hoping on an strategic partnership with Microsoft on Windows Phone 7. As Stephen Elop said during the press conference with Steve Ballmer, “we assessed Android […] but the commoditisation risk is very high”. In sight a potential Android monopoly threat operators, too and getting wary of over-supporting Android.

 

 

Best of both worlds
Confronted with Android’s two-faced agenda, major handset vendors have been apparently plotting how can they get the best of both worlds; the burgeoning apps ecosystem but without the Google’s control of the user experience. Three approaches have emerged.

1. The Do-it-yourself approach: By virtue of the open source (APL2) license, any handset vendor can take the public Android codebase, branch it, tweak it and deploy it on handsets. China Mobile has commissioned Borqs to develop the oPhone spin-off while Sharp has released handsets based on the Tapas spin-off also for the Chinese market. However, branching Android means that you miss out on the 130,000+ Android apps as Google won’t give you access to their app distribution system – which is ok if you ‘re targeting China, but unacceptable if you ‘re targeting any other region. Moreover, the Google Android codebase moves faster than any other platform (5 new versions within the space of 12 months) meaning that it’s near impossible to maintain feature parity in Android spin-offs – the same reason why Nokia publically regretted forking WebKit in the past. Lack of feature parity means that an Android spin-off would breaks the developer story and stays behind the competition of Android Experience and Partner phones.

2. The virtual machine approach: Myriad announced Alien Dalvik , a solution it claims can run Android apps on non-Android handsets, including on Maemo.  Alien Dalvik is a Java SE virtual machine designed in Zurich and China by the same ex-Esmertec guys who started off the OHA consortium. Myriad has released a demo of Alien which however hides the real issues behind a pure virtual machine approach: the lack of 100% API compatibility and most importantly access to the distribution of 130,000 apps available through Google’s Android Market.

3. The Virtualisation approach: the third and most promising approach is to run a complete replica of the Android platform within an isolated, ‘virtual’ container using mobile virtualisation technology (from Red Bend, OK Labs or VMWare – see our earlier analysis of virtualisation technologies). The virtualisation approach offers a sandboxed, complete version of Android (including the apps ecosystem) which co-habits the same handset as the OEM-specific core UI and applications. Virtualisation technology is mainstream in cloud and enterprise, but applied only in a limited context in mobile to reduce hardware costs or run enterprise micro-environments (the type Barack Obama enjoys in his virtualized BlackBerry cellphone).

The real opportunity with virtualisation is to deliver the best of both worlds for handset OEMs who want to leverage the 130,000+ apps ecosystem, but maintain their own apps experience and signature user interface. A virtualized Android co-inhabiting with the native app experience (think S40, Symbian, QNX, BlackBerry OS 6, Web OS, or Bada) would allow OEMs to resist commoditization while having ample degrees of freedom to differentiate.

The question is: will Google allow OEMs access to the Android Market and the Android trademark when the platform is run within a virtualized shell?

Such an approach would allow Sony Ericsson, Motorola, RIM, HP and the others not to compete against Android and neither to surrender to Android – but to leverage Google’s network effects and harness the Android innovation wave.

Comments welcome as always,

– Andreas
you should follow me on Twitter: @andreascon

Symbian is dead. Long live Symbian

[Is Symbian coming to the end of its shelf life? Research Director Andreas Constantinou dissects the motivations behind Nokia’s strategy and why Symbian is getting a new lease of life]

Only two short years and four months since it was announced, the Symbian Foundation is shutting down. With it dies Nokia’s second effort at creating a licensable application platform for mobile phones (the first one was S60) and to compete against Android. While Nokia is shunning to make the closure official, the last OEM supporters – Samsung and Sony Ericsson – have officially killed plans for Symbian products (see here and here) and Symbian staff are being given redundancy notices and making career moves on LinkedIn. [update: On November 8, it was announced that Nokia will regain control of the Symbian governance process and that the Symbian Foundation will be reduced to a licensing team]

The writing has been on the wall since early 2010, when Nokia took out a €500 million loan to (among other things) help sustain funding into the Symbian Foundation, whose membership fees were due to be renewed in April 2010. Symbian Foundation relied on OEMs shipping handsets to take on the operational costs at the tune of 5 million GBP per OEM. The final blow came with the departure of SyFo’s CEO and co-architect, Lee Williams.

The death of Symbian
Symbian Ltd., the OEM-backed consortium that funded Symbian development between 1999-2008 had long been suffering from an imbalance of power and poor strategic decision-making. There were three things wrong with Symbian Ltd.

Firstly, with Nokia owning 48% of Symbian Ltd. shares, the Finnish OEM had been driving the agenda at Symbian to the detriment of its OEM partners, Secondly, since the UI was severed from the base OS in 2001, Nokia had been squeezing the value out of the Symbian operating system and into its own S60 UI, middleware and applications suite platform. This meant that other OEMs had to spend considerable effort integrating Symbian with their own UIQ or MOAP layers and filling the gaps that Nokia left – effectively leading to handsets which were expensive to build.

Thirdly, with the decision to have Symbian baseporting owned by the OEM and not Symbian Ltd, each manufacturer had to spend millions to get Symbian ported onto the hardware platform, in essence reinventing the wheel. While this naturally gave Nokia the edge in producing more Symbian models more often, it meant that for other OEMs most of the budget was spent in baseporting (i.e. getting the phone to work), rather than in differentiation. In 2007 Symbian Ltd. was desperately in need of a major governance re-engineering operation.

The coup de grace arrived with the launch of Google’s OHA in November 2007, signaling two major changes in the phone industry: firstly, that open-source development (inspired by mobile Linux) was now supported by a major cash-rich backer, and not an operator consortium (LiMo) or a loose congregation of Linux system integrators and design houses (Azingo, Purple Labs, WindRiver and Montavista). Secondly, that zero royalties were now the norm and operating system development was turning from a revenue generator to a loss leader. With Android changing the rules of the game, Nokia knew that for Symbian to compete in this new world, it had to be both open source and zero royalty.

Seven months on from the Android disclosure, Nokia announced that it would be buying the remaining Symbian shares outright, paying up the equivalent of 2.5 years of royalties or 2x the revenues of Symbian Ltd – a paltry evaluation for the top smartphone OS. For Nokia it was a financial and strategic move; it made financial sense because Nokia would slash its Symbian maintenance costs (from 100 million GBP of annual license fees to 5 million GBP of annual membership fees) by sharing the SyFo costs with other OEMs on the board. It made strategic sense because with the ownership change, Nokia convinced Sony Ericsson and DoCoMo to abandon UIQ and MOAP respectively and marginalised Windows Mobile which was still royalty-based. Meanwhile, Nokia could still exert the majority influence into the Symbian roadmap by employing most engineers and most package owners (effectively well into 2010).

In retrospect, Nokia failed with both S60 and Symbian Foundation by insisting on a winner-takes-all mentality, i.e. taking roadmap control away from its OEM development partners which long-term destroyed the value in the partnerships. This winner-takes-all-mentality is nothing new; it was already harming Symbian as we had argued back in 2005. The full open sourcing of the Symbian platform in February 2010 or the cute playful new brand did not succeed in stopping neither the developer defection (see our Developed Economics report) or the OEM defection from Symbian.

With Nokia shares performing miserably over the last four years, the Finn-led board took the bold decision to oust Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and bring in a Canadian, Stephen Elop to turn the boat around. 41 days into the job, Elop announced the cutting of 1,800 jobs at Nokia and the adoption of Qt as the main development environment on top of Symbian handsets.

For Nokia, Qt presents both an opportunity and a challenge. On one hand it’s the most capable cross-platform application environment today boasting reach across mobile, PC and STB – plus depth with Qt providing a complete API wrapper on top of the native OS (and much wider API coverage than GTK to which it’s often unfairly compared). On the other hand Nokia has notoriously mismanaged the Trolltech acquisition of January 2008, with the troll CEO, CTO and key engineers abandoning ship. Meanwhile, Nokia has created a Qt break across Symbian and MeeGo UIs and not managed to fully deploy Qt on Symbian 2.5 years after the acquisition (note how Qt Mobility APIs are still way incomplete).

Long live Symbian
With Symbian Foundation soon to be diagnosed dead, the rumours about Nokia replacing Symbian are rampant. Many industry pundits are prognosticating that Nokia will adopt Android – which in 2010 is going stronger than ever – or Windows Phone 7, which comes with the freshest UI since the widget based paradigm popularised by the Jesus phone. Despite the prophecies, Symbian will live on for many years to come. As the French expression goes, Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi.

There are two reasons why Nokia won’t be abandoning Symbian anytime soon.

Firstly, Symbian is tightly integrated with Nokia’s variant management process. Nokia is the only OEM that has mastered variant management, i.e. being able to generate 100s of variants (SKUs) at the press of a button. That’s how Nokia can deliver 100s of customised smartphones to operators and retailers around the world. This variant management process is ‘hardcoded’ to Symbian, which means that replacing Symbian would seriously compromise Nokia’s ability to cater to operator requirements around the world and it would seriously hurt its market share.

Secondly, Nokia’s economies of scale rely on in-house control of core components, and the operating systems is one of them. If Nokia were to license Windows Phone it would reduce its differentiation to industrial design and Ovi alone. In the case of Android, Nokia would have to branch Android (and to sustain the cost of Android development), port Qt on Android which means another 12+ months for a stable implementation. While this remains a long-term possibility, it is still a gamble when Nokia’s priority should be to focus on killer devices and not a killer OS. Qualcomm’s BREW MP is another candidate but only when Qualcomm has a good developer platform story and that means waiting for BREW MP to launch a web-based platform akin to RIM’s WebWorks.

Symbian may no longer be a symbiotic system, but will live within Nokia for many years to come as the workhorse under the hood of Nokia smartphones.

The King is dead, long live the King.

– Andreas
You should follow me on twitter: @andreascon

Smart < feature phones = the unbalanced equation (100 Million Club series)

[Smartphones get all the media attention, but it’s feature phones that are still driving the mobile industry. Marketing Manager Matos Kapetanakis examines this unbalanced equation and makes sense of the numbers published in the latest 100 Million Club]

100 Million Club - Smart < feature phones: the unbalanced equation

Welcome back to the 100 Million Club. This 6th edition of our watchlist tracking successful mobile software companies debunks the smartphone myth and paints a detailed picture behind the 34 software products – from BREW to Webkit  – which have shipped in more than 100 million handsets as of the end of H1 2010. Click here to download the watchlist.

Key insights
– Despite the hype, smartphone platforms account for less than 20 percent of the 620+ million handsets shipped globally in Q1 and Q2 of 2010. More than 80 percent of total shipments are driven by feature phones, the majority of which use proprietary software platforms.

– BlackBerry is now the second smartphone platform, after Symbian, to break the 100M handset barrier. As of the end of June 2010, RIM has sold more than 100 million BlackBerry devices.

– A total of 350M handsets have shipped with a WebKit-powered mobile browser up to the end of 2Q10. The biggest contributors to shipments of the open source browser engine are the Series 40 and Symbian OSs, while the steep rise of Android will play a bigger role in WebKit going forward.

– Only a handful of mobile software products were shipped in more than 100 million devices during the first half of 2010. Among them are the T9/XT9 text input engines by Nuance, the vRapid Mobile software update engine by Red Bend and the Nucleus real-time OS by Mentor Graphics.

– Symbian alone has more shipments in H1 2010 than iOS and Android combined. Moreover, when combined, the Google and Apple mobile operating systems make up less than 20% of Series 40 shipments in Q1 and Q2 2010.

What’s new in the Club?
In this 6th edition of the 100 Million Club we ‘ve introduced a dedicated watchlist tracking mobile platform shipments.

The watchlist comprises of 10 application environment software products, OSs and RTOSs with more than 100 million installations. Our latest members in these categories are the BlackBerry OS by Research in Motion and ThreadX by Express Logic. We have also added media favourites Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7, for comparative purposes, since they are well below the 100 million mark.

The Embedded Software Shipments watchlist features 24 products that have been pre-installed in more than 100 million handsets. This latestedition of the club sees the addition of the Media EXP, an audio/video codec and frameworks suite by Aricent and MSIP, a mobile analytics software agent, by Carrier IQ.

100 Million Club - 1H10 - Mobile Platform Shipments
Click on the image to download the full pdf

The smart vs. ‘dumb’ phone equation
The impact of smartphones to the industry is way overrated. It’s a little-told secret that smartphones account for only 20% of worldwide handset shipments, a fact we tend to forget in the face of the one-sided media storm that surrounds smartphones. A key observation from the 100 Million Club is that the ‘proprietary’ Nokia’s Series 40 and Qualcomm BREW are shipped in many times more handsets than Android, iOS, BlackBerry even the older Windows Mobile and Symbian OSs. In fact, with 638 million cumulative shipments by the end of Q2 2010, BREW is the most widely deployed licensable mobile operating system. If one considers real-time OSes for application and baseband processors, then the shipments scale to the billions of phones.

OS, RTOS shipments H1 2010
Click on the image to download the full watchlist

So, is Nokia’s Series 40 the most successful OS ever? Not exactly; the handset market is very much dependent on internal OEM platforms, which power more than 45% of total handset shipments for H1 2010. Samsung and LG, ranking 2nd and 3rd in the top-five handset OEM leaderboard, are largely responsible for proprietary platform shipments. Samsung has heavily ramped up smartphone shipments starting in Q2 2010 (which should become visible in H2 results) and is investing in its home-grown Bada platform, a C++ layer on top of its proprietary SHP operating system. LG also hopes to get a larger piece of the smartphone pie, by releasing 20 new smartphone models in 2H10.

The 20% share of smartphone shipments is set to grow rapidly driven by two phenomena; firstly the growth of Internet-borne platforms, namely iOS and Android. Secondly, the carrier drive to commission and subsidise smartphone handsets as a differentiating strategy, which is driving the carrier-happy tier-1 OEMs (Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and LG) to bend over backwards and ramp-up smartphone production. This is unprecedented growth in share of smartphone sales, which was neighbouring at 10 percent back in 2007.

The shift of attention of traditional handset OEMs towards smartphones, coupled with the rise of smartphone-only vendors, seems to indicate a balance shift in the smartphone vs. feature phone balance. It might seem a foregone conclusion that that pretty soon we’ll have a majority of smartphones flooding the global market. However, that is not going to happen overnight, i.e. not in the next 3-4 years. Smartphone shipments of traditional OEMs are but a fraction of their overall shipments, while Apple, RIM, HTC and ZTE cannot yet hope to meet the demand of huge, feature phone-dependant, price-sensitive markets, like India and China.

Clash of the platform titans
In the clash between the more familiar platforms, Symbian and BlackBerry rule over newcomers Android and iPhone’s iOS, in terms of cumulative shipments. But the picture is quite different in terms of growth, where Android has been the clear winner, growing by leaps and bounds (from 100K activations a day in May 2010, to 160K a month later and 200K in August – activations are not the same as sales, but the growth is still impressive). RIM and Apple have seen a healthy increase in their handset sales, while Symbian has suffered a small (~3-4%) decrease in market share between H2 2009 and H1 2010, despite Nokia’s growth in the handset market. However, Symbian’s market share is bound to drop even more, considering the recent decision by Samsung and Sony Ericsson to drop Symbian altogether, as well as Nokia’s choice of MeeGo over Symbian^3 for their latest N-series. Symbian is fast becoming a Nokia-only OS so we should expect the end of the line for the Symbian Foundation within the next few months as well.

Where are MeeGo, Chrome OS and webOS in this picture? The short answer is that they are nowhere to be found in mobile devices in the first half of 2010. MeeGo is rumoured to be appearing in Q2 2010 in the market, with Nokia targeting to make first impressions last while facing delays in Qt integration and the departure of key personnel. Chrome OS will most likely be shipped solely in tablets and netbooks, while HP aims at delivering new webOS devices in early 2011.

Last but certainly not least, we should not ignore Microsoft’s latest bid for dominance in the mobile industry: Windows Phone 7. The newly released OS has been completely redesigned to offer iPhone-style margins with an Android-style business model, while targeting untapped pockets of Xbox and PC developers instead of making up with Windows Mobile developers who were left with a bitter aftertaste (see our Developer Economics research). Windows Phone 7 already seems to be building momentum, with 9 new models coming to the market in Q4, $500 million in marketing budgets and a tightly integrated hardware and software platform (see our earlier article on Windows Phone for a detailed strategic analysis).

Not museum material…yet
In summary, smartphones captivate our minds, but it’s still ‘dumb’ phones that we carry around with us. Someday in the foreseeable future, non-touch screen phones will take their place in a telecoms museum (right next to the old, ‘brick’ mobile phones), but that day is not as close as mainstream media have us think.

– Matos

30 Tablets in Q4 2010: packed train arriving at empty station

[There are 30 tablets coming by Q4 2010, but who is going to buy them? Guest author Jonathan Goldberg, Research Analyst at Deutsche Bank breaks down the supply and demand equation behind the emerging tablet market, and discusses why the impending tablet wave might be a full train arriving at an empty station]
This article is also available in Chinese.

30 Tablets in Q4 2010

The key issues

The tablet market is opening up, with at least 30 tablets coming by Q4. Here are a few key issues:

  • There are indications of at least 30 tablets coming to market by Q4. And there are reports of at least 80 to be launched in the next six months.
  • There is no hard data available about consumer usage of tablets. This might mean that most of the tablets will be undifferentiated and it is unclear who, if anyone, will buy them.
  • The leading brands in the space this Q4 are Apple, Dell and Samsung. Other major brands are expected to enter the market in 1Q11, including HP Palm, Motorola and RIM
  • Most of the tablets are using Android, but we hear that Google has been trying to discourage many of these projects. They do not support Android for use in tablets with the current Froyo V2.2 of the OS. This means some of the tablets coming this year may lack access to the Android marketplace, Google maps, etc.
  • All of the tablets we have seen run on ARM-based processors. Major suppliers will be Qualcomm for the 3G baseband and integrated applications processors. We have seen tablets using applications processors from Marvell, Nvidia, Samsung and Texas Instruments. There are also a number of designs using silicon from Atheros, Broadcom, Skyworks and Triquint. In theory, this could be good for these vendors, but the looming glut of product may dampen enthusiasm for the category.
  • Pricing will be a key determinant. Most reports peg low-end models at $300 or less. However, there are reports of prices ranging as high as $900. I believe there will be few takers for tablets priced above the iPad.

Overall, everyone likes the idea of a tablet, but I think it will take a year or two before the market shapes up. There are just too many devices coming online amid very initial interest from consumers. Eventually, the tablet may become a preferred media consumption device for consumers, filling the gap left by underpowered netbooks. There is likely room for both netbooks and tablets in the market, but it is too early to gauge the size of the tablet market.

What’s a tablet?

Any discussion on tablets needs to start with a definition. For our purposes, we will define them broadly to include anything that is not a smartphone or a laptop. These devices have no hinge as laptops do, but cannot easily fit in a pocket. This covers considerable ground from e-readers to true tablet computers.

Most of the tablets coming to the market today are less mobile than smartphones, but have essentially the same computing power. The iPad is the best example of this. The electronics of an iPad are identical to an iPhone – same processor, same memory. It does have longer battery life, but no one would argue that it is less portable than a phone, since it does not fit in a pocket.

These facts seem somewhat incongruous, leading to several interpretations. The first is that with time tablets will see an increase in computing power. In fact, there might be a few of these more powerful tablets in the works for next year. Another interpretation is that Apple has just confused the market, which they can get away with because of the power of their brand. They positioned the iPad to fit into their own product line-up, not to meet industry expectations. It will be interesting to see if any of the tablets coming out later this year have noticeable performance deficiencies, in the form of hang time and slow app loading. A more gloomy interpretation is that this is a dead-end form factor. While I’m more optimistic than that, I believe the OEMs should seriously question what ‘need’ a tablet addresses for consumers.

 

What is the Tablet Market?

To better assess the potential for the market, we need to deconstruct it a little. First, it is worth considering who has bought a tablet so far. Then we should consider what they are doing with those devices, and finally compare that to what the devices are capable of. As with all such new products, there is very little hard data available, but here’s what we know so far.

Who is buying tablets? So far, there are really two products that fit into this category – the Kindle and the iPad. Amazon has not released any data on Kindle sales, but they continue to roll out new models, so it must be doing well by some internal metric, and most reports indicate Kindle is helping to expand overall book sales by Amazon. Apple has sold over 3 million iPads since its launch last quarter, and Deutsche Bank estimates are at 12 million unit sales for this year. That’s an impressive number for a new product, but a small number relative to everyone else’s expectations for the category. It is still unclear who is buying these. By some estimates, a very large percentage of iPad buyers are already iPhone owners. There is a lot of synergy between the two with easy syncing of content and Apps via iTunes.

There is also a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the iPad has broadened the demographic group of iPhone buyers. For instance, some people have bought the device for parents and grandparents, reaching a group who is uninterested in the Apple brand but like the ease of use of the device.

What are people doing with tablets?

While waiting for further hard data on iPad usage, we can look at iPad developer activity and app downloads as a decent proxy.

Developers, for their part, seem very interested in the iPad. In the graph below you can see iPad apps versus iPhone apps, in terms of available apps in iTunes plotted against days since the release of each of the two products. iPad apps have outpaced iPhone apps in growth, although we should take into account that writing an iPad app today is much easier than writing an iPhone app when iOS first got a start, three years ago.

According to Distimo, developers for the iPad also seem to be taking advantage of a wider variety of iOS features such as in-app purchases. The Distimo data also shows that as a percentage of apps, games are more prevalent on the iPad than the iPhone. Prices for iPad apps also tend to be higher than comparable (sometimes identical) iPhone apps. From this, we infer that developers see this as a worthwhile market, and possibly one with a superior demographic for paying for software.

iPod&iPad apps vs days after launch

What it all boils down to is a lack of actual data. While there have been some consumer surveys done on the space by tablet vendors, this is really a virgin market. No one knows what consumers want from a tablet or whether they even want one at all.

I am actually somewhat optimistic about the tablet as a concept, but I think the excitement will outpace demand in the near term. There is also a gap between laptops and smartphones, that gap will find interest from some consumers, as was the case with initial excitement for netbooks. Consumers want low-priced computing devices that have larger screens than a phone. This market was artificially capped by Intel and Microsoft who sought to stave off cannibalization of their laptop business. The end result was that consumers lost interest in underpowered netbooks, which struggled to multi-task or play high quality video.

The first devices available run iOS and Android, but they will by no means be the only offerings. Google is likely to enter the fray soon with Chrome, an OS originally built for netbooks, but equally applicable for tablets. Google has even made comments that Chrome is the preferred OS for tablets. Beyond this, however, there will be other options. HP will likely have a Palm webOS tablet out soon. Blackberry has announced a new OS for their PlayBook device available early next year. And even MeeGo has to be considered a potential entrant. Although I’m skeptical about this OS’s prospects, many reports indicate that MeeGo is actually very well suited for a larger form factor like a netbook or tablet. Perhaps the only entrant I would not add to the list is Windows 7 (Big windows not Windows Phone), since conventional widom is that this OS is just not suitable to the touch-screen form factors that are quickly becoming standard for this class of device. There is a video making the rounds on the blogosphere that shows how clunky the Windows 7 interface is with touch-screen input.

In this year’s race to launch tablets, it seems like few companies have given much thought to the software experience. Most of the companies launching tablets appear to be using Android. This is despite that company’s weak support for Android on this form factor. It appears that many of the Android tablets launching this year will NOT have links to the Android marketplace as the FroYo (2.2) release is not really designed for tablets starting from the screen resolution. I believe Google is encouraging hardware makers to hold of on Android tablets until the Honeycomb release due out next year. This implies that many of the Android-based tablets coming out this year will have very few apps and limited ability to download them. Effectively, these tablets will be large, expensive browsers.

Competition

The tablet field is expected to be very crowded, from as early as 4Q10. Below is a table compiled from a range of sources, including news reports and blogs. There might be some discrepancies, especially on pricing, but many of these devices have been officially announced.

List of tablets planned for 4Q10

And this list is by no means complete. There is also this user-generated list of Android tablets coming for Christmas. At the time of writing there were 22 models listed. As if that were not enough, here is another list of all 73 tablets rumored or announced so far.

In terms of official developments, Samsung has officially launched its Galaxy Tab, RIM has announced its tablet and, most recently, reports emerged on the web that Amazon was preparing its own Android tablet and Android marketplace.

A key question will be pricing. There is no seen official word on this, but some press reports indicate the Galaxy Tab device will cost $900+ without a carrier subsidy. As PC World points out many of the tablets coming to the market are charging a premium to the iPad. Maybe Samsung can pull that off, but few other tablets will be able to command a premium to an Apple product.

Conclusion: Who benefits from tablets?

The answer to that is that there are too many tablets coming to market too soon. With no hard data about consumer usage, it’s likely that most of the products will have a hard time differentiating themselves. This will probably lead to a glut that will mean pricing pressure for most of these vendors.

From the component level, the biggest beneficiaries are the screen vendors. Capacitive touch screens are not cheap, and are probably the most expensive component in the bill of materials. So far we have seen few tear-downs of any of these tablets. The iPad BOM is very similar to the iPhone and iPod touch, running an Infineon 3G baseband, Skyworks and Triquint’s front-end modules, and the internally developed Apple A4 processor. It is likely many of the Android tablets are using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or other MSMs for 3G connectivity. Also, there are reports that tablets makers are trying out Nvidia’s Tegra, TI’s OMAP and Marvell’s Armada for applications processors.

Finally, investors will have a hard time tapping into this. On the one hand, price competition from a multitude of Android tablets would imply lots of volume. On the other hand, design wins are not free; they cost upfront engineering resources. A glut of product could lead to inventory back-ups and order declines in Q1. For the time being, my view is that tablet volumes (other than the iPad) are likely to remain small relative to PCs and handsets. Nonetheless, we should expect a shake-up next year as suppliers pick their battles carefully.

– Jonathan

[Jonathan has been a Research Analyst at Deutsche Bank for 8 years and focuses on wireless technologies and the Mobile Internet. He can be contacted at “jonathan.goldberg (at) db (dot) com”]

Remapping the handset OEM landscape: squeezed in between a rock and a hard place

[In a race for profits, the mobile industry finds itself squeezed between vertically integrated players like Apple and horizontal players like Google. What is the fate of handset manufacturers? Guest author Vinay Kapoor takes a peek into the future landscape of the mobile industry]

The top 5 mobile OEM list was recently shaken and stirred by the entry of RIM into the list of top 5 OEMs and the subsequent exit of Motorola. Previously, the top-5 OEM leaderboard had been stable for half a decade and so the most excitement you could get would be a change in the relative position of the incumbents.

Looking today at the comparative handset sales of RIM, Apple and Motorola, it is clear that the exit of Motorola from this list of top 5 OEMs has been a long time coming. While Motorola’s decline in sales may be reversed, it is unclear if Android can help propel Motorola back into the top-5 list.

So what does the future hold? If we look at the top 5 OEMs, Nokia, Samsung and LG are fairly spaced out to not expect a major change in their relative positions, assuming an absence of disruptive events. Yet, Apple and Sony Ericsson are much closer, just 1.5 million units apart.

Sony Ericsson’s President, Bert Nordberg recently stated that Sony Ericsson is seeking to not be a volume player, but rather a value player and as such will focus on smart phones. Such high value products and the higher profit that they bring would clearly take preference over market share. This is not a bad thing at all; for example Apple and RIM command a meagre 3% of the mobile device volumes, but 55% of the profits according to a Deutsche Bank analysis. Left unchecked, an un-necessary race for volumes and growth can have disastrous consequences.

Quality and profits are certainly more important than a blind race for meaningless volumes. This is a reason why the top 5 OEM list, is only part of the big picture. The strategic positioning of the manufacturers on and off that list is equally important and can often signal a rapid change in fortunes.

What’ clear is that in early 2011 we should see Apple displace Sony Ericsson from 5th position, making the top-5 list the territory of a Finnish mass-producer, two South Korean workhorses and two North America challengers.

Learning from the industry’s mistakes

Taking inspiration from a certain eruption from a volcano in Iceland (whose name I cannot pronounce!), the industry is undergoing a change in landscape. Much like the results of a volcanic eruption, this landscape and the map we draw-off of it, will change for the foreseeable future. The two “eruptions” in our case have been the surge in emergence of new, vertically integrated product experiences, as a result of Apple and RIM’s success, and the open source phenomena, triggered by Google’s Android platform.


The Evolution

From the perspective of mobile software, we are in a new phase of evolution of this landscape.

Up until the beginning of the century, OEMs built devices around vertically integrated systems. This included in-house ownership of the complete solution from hardware all the way up to the applications. The applications themselves were little more than enablers of the underlying technology; in other words software-enabled hardware.

During 2002-2008, there was an emergence of several “horizontal” value players. A lot of the underlying technology was sourced from organizations who specialized in componentised software layers, selling middleware, browsers, application frameworks and operating systems. This has been especially prevalent in smartphones powered by the likes of windows mobile and Symbian.

Since around 2009, OEMs have been building systems around open source software and open interfaces. This is not only true for software (Android, Symbian, LiMo, MeeGo), but also the hardware pieces are becoming more off–the-shelf and commoditized

The success of Apple and RIM, both of which have vertically integrated offerings (to varying degrees) has polarized the industry; manufacturers are now stuck between a rock (vertically integrated offerings from Apple and RIM) and a hard place (open source software platforms).

So, on one end are the players who are embracing and driving open source and commoditizing suppliers (Nokia, Motorola, LG) while on the other end are the players who believe in control and in-house vertical integration (Apple, RIM). Samsung, with its Bada programming layer is clearly looking to replicate Apple and RIM’s vertically integrated model. Sony Ericsson is leaning to the Open end with Android and Symbian (5 of 8 products in the core portfolio)

So is the Apple and RIM vertical model a one-way street for everyone to embrace? Apple and RIM are essentially able to afford the luxury of a complete in-house solution because of the relative lack of variation required in their software, due to fairly narrow deviations in their products (it’s not just a case of affording.. they are also buying companies to effect this – e.g. chipset, ad networks in case of Apple, QNX and Dash in case of RIM).

This is obvious for the iPhone where Apple is essentially upgrading a single product year after year. Even in the case of RIM, with seemingly several different variations on the Blackberry hardware, they deal with one main Blackberry vanilla design. Note that in that sense both Apple and RIM are both playing a fairly risky game, akin to putting your eggs in one basket. This risk is manageable as both Apple and RIM still sport unique selling points; best-in-class product design, services and user interface in case of Apple and proprietary messaging solution in case of RIM.

In case of Apple, the iPhone’s hardware and software is designed to wow the user. A combination of Apple’s brand value, shrewd marketing and design-centred approach has resulted in a desirable product that goes to the extent to sacrificing seemingly important features to keep things simple for the user. However, the iPhone would not be this ‘desirable’ were it not for the massive amount of applications, both good and bad, available to the user. That much content means that users tend to not get bored with the limitations of the few built in applications on the device.

Blackberry on the other hand has taken the approach of creating a messaging solution that is extremely simple to use and needs no complicated “setup”. The device is of course valuable to enterprises with it’s built in security mechanisms and fully integrated enterprise solutions. Once again, superior consumer experience and focus on the core group (enterprise users) has been achieved through vertical integration of the complete value chain.

For the incumbent handset OEMs who need to reduce the total cost of ownership for software, going back to the days of 100% in-house software, does not sound appealing at all. The sheer amount of work required to adapt software to 10s of hardware SKUs is not very appetizing. For these OEMs open source is a real blessing that helps tap into innovation while at the same time cutting costs on the core software R&D. This is one reason, why Samsung’s Bada move is very bold indeed. It will be interesting to see how Samsung manages to competitively maintain Bada, without the R&D cost of managing that platform having an impact on the Korean manufacturer’s bottomline.

So, it seems that a polarized universe is the only way forward with some players betting on open source and commoditized hardware, and others on vertical systems.

The struggle for differentiation

Once Sony Ericsson and Samsung have finally placed their bets with Bada and Android the ecosystem will settle down into this polarized state.

The vertically integrated players will have the privilege of keeping a high barrier to entry for any new entrant. This assumed new entrant will have to replicate what Apple did with the iPhone, which is not something you see very often.

The players in the open ecosystem will, however, have to guard against the king of cost Shanzai (fake phone) brands that have the possibility to challenge established OEMs. The assumption here is that a drive to open systems will lower the barrier to entry. When any tom-dick-and-harry can slap one of several open source software stacks on top of one of several chipsets readily support such software stacks, the need to differentiate will extend beyond hardware and software design. It is too risky to assume that the consumer will remain committed to a brand solely on the basis of these easy-to-replicate characteristics.

So what is it that the OEMs can use to differentiate their offerings? One must remember that a consumers experience of product and a brand is an amalgamation of several points of contact with the brand and the product. The look and feel of the hardware, and the usability of the device are just two such contact points. A consumer interacts with both the device and the brand in many other ways, like using a cloud service provided with the device, or calling a call-centre for support. A differentiated offering will evolve, based on not just user interface but complete user experience (hardware, software, UI, cloud services, customer service). These will be necessary defences and barriers, which the incumbents will need, in order to protect against being reduced to commodities fighting on price. We may see OEMs positioning their products based on this complete package rather than simply advertising stunning hardware and user interface design.

Those that build a robust defence (the Gorillas) will command the landscape through their sheer size and position. The super efficient king-of-cost players will present a challenge with their sheer agility and cunning (the foxes). Rest assured, anyone stuck in the middle (the jungle) will be stuck in a constant struggle for survival. What a great ending to the fairy tale!

– Vinay

[Vinay Kapoor is a Business development director at Tieto where he helps build new revenue streams and helps shape Tieto’s mobile devices strategy. Vinay has been a mobile industry insider for over a decade and has an avid interest in the events that shape this ever changing industry. You can follow him on Twitter (www.twitter.com/vinaykap) or on his blog (http://wirelessmantra.blogspot.com)]

Mapping the mobile ecosystem: top-20 most connected companies

Back in March we released the 3rd edition of the Mobile Industry Atlas, the definitive who’s who of the mobile industry. Since its humble beginnings in 2008, the Atlas has grown to more than 1,100 companies across 69 industry sectors; including all key companies, from 20:20mobile to ZTE, and market sectors, from Active Idle Screen solutions to Service Delivery Platforms.

To distill market noise into market sense, we have broken down the entire mobile ecosystem into four main categories:the core value chain, the suppliers to network operators, the suppliers to handset manufacturers and finally the services that run on top.

Top-20 most connected companies in mobile
We run some stats on our Atlas database and came up with an interesting analysis on the most ‘connected’ companies in mobile, i.e. the companies who have fingers (products) in most pies (market sectors).

At the top of the list are Nokia, Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm, which represent heavyweights from manufacturing, services, software and IP backgrounds respectively. Nokia appears in 17 market sectors including, the OS and Browser sectors, Developer Tools, Mobile Search, Barcode Services and Connected Addressbook sectors, to name a few.

It’s also instructive to analyse which market sectors are most frequently encountered within these top-20 companies: it’s operating systems, browsers, application stores, as well as content management & delivery infrastructure. These sectors are either building blocks as part of a more integrated offering (as in the case of operating systems or browsers), or high growth opportunities (as in the case of app stores).

How does this help me?
The main function of the Atlas is to provide a clear view of the key players operating in each sector of the mobile ecosystem. For example, the Handset Manufacturer Supply Chain can give you an idea of the leading companies operating in this part of the ecosystem, from chipset manufacturers and RF component manufacturers all the way to operating systems and browsers. It’s all in there, from the much-hyped Android platform to the more obscure plastics manufacturers and vendors of input technologies. Most of the Atlas is being a paywall, but you can see a sample here.

Under-the-radar sectors
We ‘ve showcased several under-the-radar sectors into the Atlas, including Application Analytics, Campaign Analytics and Service Analytics. These three sectors comprise the leading providers of usage and marketing analytics tools to developers and mobile web (or WAP) sites, as well as platforms for mining network or service data to extract service intelligence. Naturally, you ‘ll also find your typical hyped sectors like Mobile Ad Networks & Mediation Engines, as well as Mobile Advertising Platforms and Agencies. The Connected Addressbook sector is yet another category that has attracted a lot of media attention and is part of our Atlas.

The complete list of market sectors in the Atlas is below, broken down into the four main categories:

Network operator supply chain Handset manufacturer supply chain
– Billing platforms
– Call completion, voice messaging & voicemail
– Content Management & Delivery
– Content retailing and billing mediation
– Core network and radio infrastructure
– Customer support services
– Deep Packet Inspection
– Mobile media publishing platforms
– MVNEs
– OSS / BSS
– Service Analytics
– Service delivery platforms & Network APIs
– SMS/MMS gateways & aggregators
– Traffic & content optimisation		 – Application environments
– Audio middleware
– Baseband and application processors
– Browsers
– Camera technology and subsystems
– Imaging and video middleware
– Input technology
– Multimedia chipsets
– Non-cellular connectivity components
– Operating systems
– Plastics & mechanics
– RF components
– Silicon
– UI frameworks
Core value chain Content and services
– Industrial design
– User interface design
– Reference hardware designs
– System integrators
– ODMs and contract manufacturers
– Handset OEMs
– Luxury handset OEMs
– Mobile network operators
– MVNOs
– SIM card OEMs
– SIM application vendors & services
– Distributors
– Retailers		 – Active Idle Screen solutions
– Application Analytics
– Barcode Services
– Campaign Analytics
– Connected Address book
– Content backup & synchronisation
– Developer tools
– Device capabilities databases
– E-mail synchronization
– Enterprise mobility
– Games publishers
– IVR Platforms
– Mobile Ad Networks & Mediation Engines
– Mobile Advertising Platforms & Agencies
– Mobile banking and payments
– Mobile content publishers
– Mobile Device Management
– Mobile instant messaging and chat
– Mobile search
– Mobile social networking
– Mobile VoIP
– Navigation, Mapping and Location platforms
– On-Device Portal solutions
– Recommendation services
– Security solutions
– Software integration services
– White-label Application Stores
– Widget Platforms

The Mobile Industry Atlas is available in A1+ wallchart format or PDF, for carrying around in your iPad or sharing with colleagues.
What do you think of the Atlas and what would you like to see next?

– Matos