At
the risk of repeating what many believe, mobile is likely to be new battle
field of the internet giants. The key advantages of mobile seem to twofold: the
reach and frequency. Although not everyone, especially in developing countries,
will not have personal computers or laptops, most you see in developed or
developing countries have or have access to mobile phones. The sheer number of
population reachable by mobile phones is greater than that reachable by PC, in
an aptly named post-PC era. The frequency (or intimacy) of using mobile to
access internet is also the reason why mobile remains very attractive. After
all, mobile phone is almost always with you. I believe that mobile will be the
platform of choice for the generation to come for accessing information and
staying connected to the increasingly digital world.
In
the battle for mobile, for hardware and software, I believe that the market
will not be a winner takes all, but rather a fragmented one with a handful of
significant players such as Apple and Google retaining a strong grip while
other players such as Microsoft, Nokia and Samsung make up the rest. I also
believe that Facebook would have a meaningful role in the mobile era (and Mark
Zuckeberg apparently typed the entire letter to shareholders in preparation of
Facebook's IPO on his phone), and benefit from the secular trend towards
mobile.
Apple,
with its vertical integration, loyal customer base from invention of the first
great smart phone, app store and strong Apple ecosystem will likely to continue
its dominance in the mobile industry. Its advantages allow it to retain a
greater profitability profile than its competitors and its most recent iphone 5
release seems to be on the way to break its preceding records after being
hailed as the best smartphone ever by several critics. The challenges from
Samsung in putting forth Galaxy series as strong competition to iphone has
somewhat been thwarted by Apple's successful litigation against Samsung.
However the future of this competition (i.e., iphone vs Galaxy) will be worth watching
for some time to come.
Google,
with its free Android platform offered to phone manufacturers, will likely to
continue its strengths in the mobile OS segment. I believe that Google's free
offering and strong developers network will continue to eat away Symbian's
established subscriber base as more and more feature phones are converted to
smart(er) phones. Nokia's Symbian plan to open it may decelerate the power
shift in, but I believe that Nokia woke up to the game too late and that it
will struggle to retain its leading market share of Symbian base users.
Similarly,
I believe that Microsoft is too late to the game (their Windows 8 phone is
slated to be released by end of 2012, five years later than iphone's first
release) to materially shift the power balance of the mobile landscape.
Alongside with Nokia, it will retain some share of the market, but will not be
the leaders or standard setters in the field. I view RIM, the maker the
blackberry, to be in a significant danger, and believe that they will only
retain a small percentage of the market by holding on the its enterprise niche,
where its security and keyboard typing can serve as strengths. Even such
strengths will need to be carefully guarded and developed as a killer security
application that makes other devices just as secure and easy for the corporate
network may become its final blow.
While
traveling in developing countries, I noticed that many on the
street/restaurants continued to use feature phones made by Nokia (or
Samsung/LG) and that the deployment of smartphones were far from being mature.
Whether the end user chooses iphone, android ran phones or Nokia, many will
convert to smart phones in the next couple of years and the internet giant with
the most to provide (iphone and android phones in my rather US centric view)
and the market for the mobile will only get bigger.
One
anecdote: I remember the days when I lived in Korea that no phone other than
Samsung was even worth considering. iphone changes all that and it is
interesting for me to see more people outside of Korea adopting Samsung readily
as Apple eats away at Samsung's once super loyal customer base in Korea...
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