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It's ugly out there for the traditional PC makers. IDC says PC sales fell 14 percent in the first quarter on a year-over-year basis. That's worse than its forecast of a 7.7 percent drop.
This is the worst quarter for PC industry since 1994 when IDC started tracking sales. So, that pretty much makes it the worst quarter in history.
IDC blames Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system for alienating consumers. The new tile-based interface is too weird for consumers, says IDC.
Instead of buying new laptops or desktops, people are buying tablets and smartphones which serve as good-enough alternatives.
For example, every day more than 1.3 million Android devices are activated — which is way more than the 300,000 babies born daily. Users now spend more time each day surfing the web or on their mobile apps than they do watching television. There are more than a billion smartphones in use around the world, and age is no barrier — teens, adults and seniors are all well represented among their users. More than 60% of the apps in the Apple app store have never been downloaded (not even once)
"In addition to connections, for carriers, jumping into cloud computing offerings can be a way to make additional revenue with services. “Many have stepped up to provide end-to-end cloud solutions,” DeCarlo pointed out. “Telecom companies have more than just the network; most also have significant data center infrastructures and deep expertise in virtualization. They can leverage this to create complete end-to-end cloud solutions, particularly in areas like IaaS.” Indeed, there are opportunities available for carriers that decide to include cloud in their portfolio. DeCarlo highlighted that cloud services could give carriers more than just a source of replacement revenue for services whose margins are declining rapidly. “On-demand service can introduce a whole new set of prospects to the carrier’s services and open up new market growth sectors to the provider,” she said."
Android's share of the Chinese smartphone market ended the third quarter at 90 percent.
According to Analysys International, Android's share is up from 83 percent a quarter prior and 58 percent a year ago.
With the Chinese market now accounting for a quarter of global smartphone shipments, Android's dominance there is driving its widening lead in global smartphone platform market share.
In China, Android's gain has mostly come at the expense of Symbian, Nokia's antiquated platform that will eventually disappear as Nokia shifts its product offerings on to Windows Phone.
Interestingly, despite its dominance, Google only offers limited support for Google Play in China and Android apps are usually downloaded in third-party app markets.
Apple, meanwhile, has never really gained traction after a weak market entry on only one of the country's major providers. The iPhone 5 will be available on two carriers, but as of now will not be distributed by the largest carrier, China Mobile. Additionally, while many Chinese consumers may fawn over iPhones, they are simply out of reach financially for a substantial part of the market.
New analysis by the Telco 2.0 team shows that the mobile industry’s combined revenues from voice, messaging and data services in the EU5 economies (UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy) will drop by nearly 20Bn Euros, or 4% per year, in the next...
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For the three months ended in February, Apple had 38.9 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, up from 35 percent for the same period ending in November. Android fell to 51.7 percent over the same period, down from 53.7 percent. The United States is not the world, but it is a leading market for smartphones. So, it's worth paying attention to these trends. Apple has been able to eat into Android's lead thanks to increased distribution and lowered pricing. The iPhone wasn't available from Verizon until February 2011, four years after it debuted on AT&T. It later joined Sprint, then some regional carriers, and this year it's going to T-Mobile. Apple offers the iPhone at a variety of prices on Verizon and AT&T, from $0 to over $400. A free-on-contract iPhone has made it an option for more people. Android is a great operating system available on a number of excellent phones, some with gigantic screens. It's odd that it's gone flat. It's not just a U.S. phenomenon for Android, either.
MarketWatch estimates that all of those old phones sitting around are worth $34 billion. (That's allphones, not just smartphones.)
For years, people have been predicting the death of Microsoft's Windows dominance. And in the last two years, it's finally happened. The rise of iOS and Android have made Microsoft's operating system significantly less important.
Luckily for Microsoft, this hasn't meant the death of its business overall. Thanks to the strength of its Office franchise and its Servers and Tools business, Microsoft is still very healthy.
But, there's no escaping that Windows is what drives the whole company. CEOSteve Ballmer calls Windows, "the heart and soul of Microsoft from WindowsPCs to Windows Servers to Windows Phones and Windows Azure." And that heart is beating a little bit more weakly today than it was in say, 2005.
This chart from Asymco earlier this year illustrates the decline of Microsoft's Windows monopoly as Apple has risen. There are other illustrations of the same thing here and here.
For the last couple of years, sales of Android-based smartphones have been smoking every other kind of smartphone, including the iPhone. Android phones now account for nearly 75% of the global smartphone market. The next closest competitor is iPhones, which have about 15% of the market.
In the U.S., Android is clubbing iPhone 53% to 34%. Given such a disparity in phone sales and usage, you would think that things people do with smartphones--smartphone-based activities--would be equally dominated by Android.
But they aren't. They're not even equal.
In fact, iPhone users completely dominate Internet-based smartphone activities. A recent survey of mobile web usage found that a staggering 60% of mobile web visits came from iOS devices, while only 20% came from Android. A study IBM did of Black Friday online sales showed much the same thing--except that it was even more skewed. iOS (iPads and iPhones) accounted for nearly 20% of Black Friday sales. Android devices, meanwhile, accounted for only 5.5%.
From PewResearchCenter — Trends in News Consumption: 1991-2012 While traditional news platforms have lost audience, online news consumption has been undergoing major changes as well. Nearly one-in-five Americans (17%) say they got news yesterday on a mobile device yesterday, with the vast majority of these people (78%) getting news on their cell phone. Among smartphone owners, nearly a third (31%) got news yesterday on a mobile device. The second major trend in online news consumption is the rise of news on social networks. Today, 19% of the public says they saw news or news headlines on social networking sites yesterday, up from 9% two years ago. And the percentage regularly getting news or news headlines on these sites has nearly tripled, from 7% to 20%.
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