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Since this landmark study came out, the internet industry has been in a low-grade panic because the data shows that its ads do not work and thus, its numbers are all fake. People online do not respond to ads as people on television or reading a newspaper do; they simply tune out the noise. Ever since then, these companies have been directly or indirectly faking their numbers, because they know when the real numbers come out, the Big Tech game is up and they all go back to managing Windows networks at donut shops in small midwestern cities.

I remember when the web was first starting up, people were wondering which model it would follow: newspapers, television, radio, or libraries.

I suggested the library model since in my view, there was no money to be made off of the net in the way that would support a whole industry.

It seemed at first that I was wrong, and then these studies came out:

1. Natural Born Clickers
2. The Click Remains Irrelevant

These tell us that 8% of the users account for 85% of the ad clicks, and these users tend to be from households with yearly income under $40,000.

In other words, advertising on the internet does not reach the audience it wants, but instead is mostly taken up by the people who spend a lot of time on the internet because they have no other form of recreation.

This has been exacerbated by the bots which take up 28% of internet traffic, the use of ad blockers, and the tendency of experienced people whose time is valuable to avoid the internet since its audience now seems like daytime TV watchers after the mobile era began in 2007.

Since those studies have come out, we have seen the big companies trying to jockey "we have a lot of warm bodies" into "our advertising is valuable," when all credible data suggests the opposite.

In other words, assume the crash position.

I remember when the web was first starting up, people were wondering which model it would follow: newspapers, television, radio, or libraries.

I suggested the library model since in my view, there was no money to be made off of the net in the way that would support a whole industry.

It seemed at first that I was wrong, and then these studies came out:

1. Natural Born Clickers
2. The Click Remains Irrelevant

These tell us that 8% of the users account for 85% of the ad clicks, and these users tend to be from households with yearly income under $40,000.

In other words, advertising on the internet does not reach the audience it wants, but instead is mostly taken up by the people who spend a lot of time on the internet because they have no other form of recreation.

This has been exacerbated by the bots which take up 28% of internet traffic, the use of ad blockers, and the tendency of experienced people whose time is valuable to avoid the internet since its audience now seems like daytime TV watchers after the mobile era began in 2007.

Since those studies have come out, we have seen the big companies trying to jockey "we have a lot of warm bodies" into "our advertising is valuable," when all credible data suggests the opposite.

In other words, assume the crash position.

Presumably, by "lots of people who can't afford to pay", Mark means people who can't afford Apple's products. These aren't necessarily people without any money at all, more likely they're people with less money than the typical apple consumer, who typically earns higher income than average.

US market share: IOS 43.6%; Android 52.8%

France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom: IOS 18.3%; Android 77%

All I have been hearing is Apple, Apple, Apple. Yet from Motorola killed the headphone jack and nobody noticed 10 days ago

There are many interesting things about the Moto Z devices presented yesterday, ultra-thin handsets that bring modularity to Motorola’s lineup of mobile products. One of them is the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack, which absolutely nobody noticed during the event.

While you are correct Motorola's market share is very small and shrinking as they have around 5% of the market where as Apple has over 40% and I bet most of the people are also unhappy with Motorola getting rid of the 3.5mm headphone jack. After all the last thing I need is another adapter I need to carry around unless I pony up for another set of headphones.

I know you are being tongue and cheek, but very recent history is starting to show companies can make plenty of money just catering to the upper middle class. The richest company in the world (Apple) makes products that are only intended for a very small percentage of even a wealthy nation's population (46.3% of households with iPads have income over $100k). While rapid economic growth does need a sizable consumer class, I don't believe it necessarily needs a robust middle class. A much smaller but still sizable upper middle class will probably do just as well.

They were at 41% for the three-month period ending in May. Two factors to keep in mind here: this research pertains specifically to US carriers, so it makes sense to look specifically at US market share, and we're specifically looking at smartphones, not the general cellular market. Globally, Apple's market share is significantly lower than in the US, even more so once you factor in non-smartphones, so I don't doubt that 15% is probably accurate somewhere for some set of conditions, but it isn't applicable in this particular case. 41% is the applicable number in this case.

187 people?! What the hell do they do all day?

Operate the 8th largest website [1] and develop FOSS software [2] among other things.

Let's be fair, is there really a doube of why Apple is slowly losing out of market share in the smartphone wars?

Probably because they refuse to make a cheap phone. Apple continues to grow at a rapid pace in the United States, where phones are subsidized and we have higher average incomes. Android's growth is in 3rd world countries through cheap, low end phones. http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2013/10/comScore_Reports_August_2013_US_Smartphone_Subscriber_Market_Share

Apple commanded 51.2% of the U.S. smartphone market in the 4Q 2012

No it doesn't.

http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2013/5/comScore_Reports_March_2013_U.S._Smartphone_Subscriber_Market_Share

"Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with 52 percent market share (71.1 million subscribers), while Apple’s share increased 2.7 percentage points to 39 percent (53.3 million subscribers)"

I am not sure where you are getting your data, but its different from everyone else, considering America is Apples strongest (only) market it does not look good,
I

http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2013/2/comScore_Reports_December_2012_U.S._Smartphone_Subscriber_Market_Share I'm sorry why are you posting figures tha agree with me, as though they don't its a little eerie. From the article "Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with 53.4 percent market share (up 0.9 percentage points)"

Where does it say that they measured Google search results? RTFA or at least their about page before defending poor little M$.

Something being very popular does not de-facto make it a monopoly.

Actually, under the law, it pretty much does, at the scale Youtube has: if these numbers are to be believed, nearly 44% of worldwide online video viewing.

Compare that with the second place, Youku, in China, which has 2.3% of the viewership. Facebook makes the top 5, at 1.3% of global views. Considering that #2 and #5 are in China & Japan, it's very likely that Youtube represents a MUCH higher percentage of US-based video viewing than those global numbers would indicate, which would probably confer monopoly status on Youtube here in the US, even if it's not as popular somewhere abroad.

When you are 20-40 times the size of your second, third, fourth, and fifth place competitors... it's pretty hard to claim that you're perched precariously on top of a hill, ready to be knocked off by any errant breeze that comes your way. Youtube is not an underdog. Google is not an underdog. All of their competitors you are claiming are "very large," and poised to destroy Youtube at a moment's notice, are microscopic also-rans in Youtube's market, and pose no substantial threat to Youtube unless Youtube mysteriously goes offline for a year.

comScore has such information. However, their latest report (linked) is currently for October and compares against July.

Rather true...

Except, globally, Apple is a pathetic blip on the radar of marketshare and Google is much more of the monopoly, if there is one at all. In the US, it's completely the opposite, sure. But who's gonna come out better in the end--the guy who can take over the majority of the world, or the guy who can only take over one small piece that's not even growing as fast as the rest any more (and can barely keep a good grip on that, even)?

Oh wait... better pull some sources...

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2012/9/comScore_Reports_July_2012_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share : So in the US, Google (Android) outdoes Apple at 52.2% vs. 33.4% (for July).

Harder to find a good source for Global, but: http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/08/technology/smartphone-market-share/index.html : Android 68% vs Apple 17% ; Samsung accounts for 44% of that Android number... (CNN pulled those from IDC... if you want to spend $2000, you can get the report from IDC yourself...)

Well... still, I can stand by my original statement, but Apple has continued falling behind Google in the US, too, clearly (just not as much as globally, where Symbian was the bigger player before Android anyway).

I was just reading this morning that phone sales are down for everyone (except Apple apparently).

What were you reading, a blog written by your sister? (IOW, link please.) For the rest of us, the situation seems to be developing as you would expect, contrary to widespread reality distortion from Apple. Samsung to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 26.0 percent market share. Google Android continued to grow its share in the U.S. smartphone market, accounting for 51 percent of smartphone subscribers, while Apple captured more than 30 percent.

Availability of content. You're not leaving your phone on all the time, and I'm not sure how fast your upload is, nor about your data limits. And that's assuming you have a smartphone and that you have a data connection with it.

Your premise is something I addressed in my original post - most people are within wifi range most of the time so data limits are only applicable to "life-line" situations. Even today, over 100 million US residents own smartphones. I don't think it is a stretch to say that once you eliminate people who don't use social networking, that 100+ million smartphone users starts to look like at least 75% of the remaining population and those numbers will only increase as time passes.

Contact management, searching for friends, etc: we all know how well search works on a fully decentralised system like Gnutella. Without centralised index search just doesn't scale well.

Searching on gnutella is far more common than searching on facebook. The entire point of gnutella is to find new stuff. The entire point of facebook is to communicate with people you have already found. So what if a DHT is less efficient than a centralized search? People don't search enough on facebook for it to be a significant factor. But even then, given the six degrees rule a DHT that mimics social circles would probably be just as fast as a centralized search engine for more than 99% of searches.

I'd like to know how current Facebook can be done with a fully decentralised system. The "likes", the news feed with updates from friends who may or may not be online right then, etc.

Social networking is not a hard real-time system. It is no big deal if news feed updates take a couple of hours in the case where both end-points aren't online simultaneously - after all if they aren't online it doesn't really matter if facebook is instantaneous or not either since being offline means you can't read the update regardless of centralization.

And for those rare cases where a user is only online for very limited amounts of time? Let their social circle cache their information, so that as long as any one friend is online to receive an update, anyone else can come along and pull that same information from the friend instead of directly from the source.

The article is very light on specifics of where this data was obtained, other than pointing at Comscore.

I suspect the original source was this ComScore blog article. Even that article is very light on methodology.

Quoting:

While Google Plus nearly matches Tumblr from an audience standpoint in the U.S., it does not yet attract similar levels of user engagement on its primary web pages. Importantly, these figures account for activity on plus.google.com and [but] do not include engagement with the Google Plus toolbar or other distributed content throughout the Google network of sites.

Right there seems to be an admission that ComScore isn't able to measure the total engagement, because they can't see it, and nobody needs to access plus.google.com once they are signed up. All the links you need appear on pages protected by https.

The very nature of Google+, with its circles of friends may work against any outsiders having any real access to the amount of time spent there by the average user. and, google's use of https makes this harder still.

These guys are shooting in the dark.

Still, I tend to agree, I only know of a few bloggers who think its cool to hang the little G+ symbol behind their names.

But the single dock only applies to Apple. Nobody else uses it.

With Android now some 47% of the market its time to start using a more standardized approach to this than relying on a single proprietary dock.

It might be HDMI, or Bluetooth, USB, or something else. But it should be an industry standard.
Ideally, I shouldn't have to take my phone out of my pocket when I get in the car, I should have phone, maps, and music all linked to the car automatically via something like Bluetooth 3.0 or something.

Cars aren't the only thing that people will want to link to their phones. Houses and offices could use such an interface. Cables and docking are so yesterday.

here are the other links:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/12/comScore_Releases_November_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/11/comScore_Releases_October_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/5/comScore_Releases_April_2010_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings

here are the other links:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/12/comScore_Releases_November_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/11/comScore_Releases_October_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/5/comScore_Releases_April_2010_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings

here are the other links:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/12/comScore_Releases_November_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/11/comScore_Releases_October_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/5/comScore_Releases_April_2010_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings

You're exactly right. Take a look at comscore for dec 2011:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2012/1/comScore_Releases_December_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings

More than 18.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in December (up 2 percent).

Nov 2011:

More than 17.8 billion explicit core searches were conducted in November.

Oct 2011:

More than 18.0 billion explicit core searches were conducted in October, marking a 6-percent increase versus September.

Go all the way back to April 2010:

Americans conducted 15.5 billion searches in April, up slightly from March.

Where's the decline? Whoever fired him is really good at their job.

N800, bitchez!

(Seriously, why does everyone think Android is/was the only competitor to Apple?)

They're probably looking at U.S. smartphone market share; Symbian is way down at the bottom and Maemo/Meego/whatever isn't listed. In world smartphone market share, Symbian is slightly ahead of iOS but is well behind err, umm, Android.

And iOS is the #1 mobile OS on the web, which suggests a large portion of Android users are budget buyers who aren't even using their smartphones as smartphones.

Not really. It only suggests iOS users browse more, not that Android users don't. You need to know install base percent as well.

For example, here is a report on mobile web in US, which shows pretty close 34% Android devices for 31% of mobile traffic and 43% Apple devices for 58% traffic.

Linux was even created because Linus wanted a free UNIX like desktop I'm sorry but you're mistaken. You can read the history of Linux's early days writted by Torvalds here. I quote him, bold is mine.

It is currently meant for hackers interested in operating systems and 386's with access to minix. [...] I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjouyed [sic] doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.

You're probably right on the other point

Since the beginning Linux users have touted how this will be the year of Linux on desktop

This is probably never going to happen (not with a substantial market share) but 2011 was the year of Linux in the pocket (remember Linux is only the kernel) and 2012 could be the year of Linux on the desk.

because Linux users very much have wanted Linux to be number #1 on desktop

That's unbelievable right? As if Mac users wouldn't like to see their platform to become the number 1.

Everyone including wikipedia is quoting a Comscore report from August 2010, /except/ for Comscore. No record of it there at all.
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases?year=3885&keywords=hotmail&location=0&searchBtn=Search

Perhaps someone could find it? Or link to another report, rather than a reference?

Zero, if you exclude the Chinese-language market (which is presumably of little interest to US regulators). Google's market share is somewhere around 10x all their main English-language competitors combined.

I'm not sure it has ever been true that Google had >91% of the search market, but it's certainly not true now.

Google's US search market share for August 2011 was 64.8%. The next largest competitor is Yahoo, with 16.3%, followed by Microsoft with 14.7%. But since Yahoo search is actually Microsoft also, really MS has 31%. So Google has barely double Microsoft's share.

In terms of the measurement you used, Google has 1.8x the share of all of their competitors combined in the US. That's a far cry from 10x, and clearly not a monopoly.

If you want to look at this stuff, Microsoft's remaining desktop OS share is greater than Google's search share, and Microsoft clearly and unashamedly exploits their desktop share to boost their search market share. I recently bought a new PC, which came with Windows 7. I didn't use Windows/IE for long; mostly I just downloaded an Ubuntu ISO. But I did notice something that made me shake my head and chuckle.

When you install Google Chrome, the first thing it does upon starting up is ask you which search engine you want to use; Google, Yahoo or Bing. When you use IE you get Bing. Period. Even if you go into the setup to "manage search engines", I think it was called, Google is not offered as an option. I'm sure if I'd dug one level deeper there would have been a way to type in an appropriately-formatted URL to make Google IE's default search engine, but it would have required a little research.

Microsoft is not one who should be accusing Google of leveraging monopolies.

http://ir.comscore.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=596854

Only the effectively dead Symbian is keeping Microsoft out of last place in the cellphone market right now.

Free stuff is nice, but developers aren't going to waste their time on a dying platform like Windows Phone 7.

Absolutely correct, visitors != users. TFA jumps back and forth between the two terms, but the visitors # has to be incorrect - if they have 25M visitors and 20M+ accounts, that means less than 5M other people in the whole world have visited G+ this month without an account. Clearly wrong. Hell I count for 5 visitors myself and 1 account, having accessed G+ from 5 different IP's. Ironic though - without FB, Twitter, and the like, G+ wouldn't have the medium to spread as fast as it is spreading.

Except that comScore Media Matrix, the ultimate source for all this, measures the number of visitors to a site.

So no, visitors is right, users is wrong.

Android devices in general outnumber iOS devices.

No they don't. If you add iPad and iPod Touch to iPhone, the total is much higher than all Android devices added together.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/4/Apple_iOS_Platform_Outreaches_Android_by_59_Percent_in_U.S

Wrong. Android officially passed iOS up this year.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/4/Apple_iOS_Platform_Outreaches_Android_by_59_Percent_in_U.S

I would assume that the reason Android has a bigger marketshare than iPhone OS...

That's a misconception.

Android phones have a bigger percentage of the marketshare of phones than the iPhone has.

But the total number of devices running iOS(iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, tv is 59% greater than the total number of devices running Android.

People compare marketshare of "MS-Windows" machines to Apple (MacOS) machines all the time. One is a huge variety of machines (MS-Windows) and the other is just a few models all from one company (Apple).

So what is there to not understand?

There are a dozen Android phones for which the hardware is superior to the iPhone. And the "environment" is basically Android for all of them, and they can almost all run almost all the same apps. So yes, it *does* make sense to lump all of the Android phones together when comparing to lumping the three models of the iPhone together.

And I don't know where you are getting your statistics, but there are already a lot more Android OS phones in use than there are iOS phones.... get your facts straigh

So you're saying that you compare operating systems.....

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/4/Apple_iOS_Platform_Outreaches_Android_by_59_Percent_in_U.S

If you are a fanboy, YOU will be hurt to know that there are more devices being sold with iOS than with Android. Not that it matters. Both platforms are doing quite well.

First, there are so many lawsuits among mobile companies that a single extra one isn't going to have a chilling effect. All of these companies have enough cash that the cost of fighting a lawsuit alone will not hurt them (a big judgement might be a different story).

Secondly, MIcrosoft licensing costs aren't very much for Windows Phone 7. Estimates of licensing costs are between $5 and $15 on a phone that, with a data plan, ultimately costs thousands of dollars. Or, in the case of Nokia, Microsoft is paying Nokia to use it. $5 is still a cost, but it's not the reason people don't like WP7.

Then the article gets plain idiotic. It says Apple makes money on hardware, not on their OS. But this is true of every single Android phone as well.

The next factual error is a surprising one, but still serious. Look at the numbers of iOS vs Android devices. There are a lot more people using iOS than Android (note the figures include tablets). Surprising, but if you're going to write a tech journal you should be on top of this kind of thing.

Finally there is no reason to question why Apple is suing. It's about money. Just like every single other lawsuit in the mobile space. They all think they can get some extra money by suing, so they do.

and apparently followed a similar path to NASA GLORY....

http://comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/3/comScore_Reports_January_2011_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share

Although the raw drop from 9.7% to 8% looks like a slight dip; remember that it really a more precipitous 17+% drop in its market.

ComScore reports search engine market share for the US each month. They report, for January 2011:

• Google: 66.6%, down 1% since last month.
• Yahoo: 16.1%, up 0.1%.
• Microsoft: 13.1%, up 1.1%.
• Ask: 3.4%, down 0.1%.
• AOL: 1.7%, down 0.2%.

Yahoo is just reselling Bing now. Yahoo no longer has a search engine. So Bing's total is 29.2%. The US market has been split about like that for the last several years - Google with 2/3 of the market, Microsoft + Yahoo with 1/3, and the rest nowhere.

Outside the US, Google is dominant in most countries other than China (Baidu) and Russia (Yandex).

I agree, their reporting is not rigorous. The first sentence, "61.5 million people in the US owned smartphones during the three months ending in November 2010", is saying the number of smartphone owners did not change by more than 100,000 for 3 solid months. The next clause of that sentence, "up 10 percent from the preceding three-month period", clearly contradicts this. They don't link their source, though they do at least say "according to comScore". I found a press release by comScore which appears to be the source of the table from the TechSpot article. Interestingly, the first sentence of the TechSpot article I quoted above appears verbatim in the comScore press release. Neither discusses how the numbers were compiled or possible sources of error or discrepancy with other, similar reports.

Really, it's poor reporting for TechSpot to plagiarize from comScore, and for comScore to report patently false information with insufficient discussion. And this is why I so often get mad when I read journalist's statistics.

Given that the assertion was "the iPhone is the most popular smartphone", it's reasonably easy to believe.

One more time... "most popular smartphone."
Smartphone.
Not smartphones. Not plural.
Smartphone. Singular.
One phone.

Android is NOT a smartphone.
Motorola Droid X is a smartphone.
HTC Evo is a smartphone.
Blackberry Pearl is a smartphone.
iPhone 4 is a smartphone.
Palm Pre Plus is a smartphone.

http://comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/9/comScore_Reports_July_2010_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share
Only two models of the iPhone are available at a time (currently 3GS and 4), and that Blackberry has 6 models. Unless one model of Blackberry accounts for over half the sales, it's highly likely that any particular Blackberry is the "most popular smartphone." And I'm thinking that between the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS isn't the most popular one selling now either. This leaves the iPhone 4 as the most probable "most popular smartphone."

Go ask Palm how licensing their mobile OS worked out for them.

How about we ask Google how it's going for Android instead?

Google up 5 points and Apple _down_ 1.3. If you've been following the trends you'd see that the momentum has been rapidly shifting to Android phones.

Just because you can drop in a bigger engine, all-wheel-drive transmission, new suspension, and turbocharge a Honda Civic does not make these actions "features" of the car; it's not even close.

Sure, you can modify anything, but isn't the rating of a piece of hardware only considered regarding how it is when it is shipped to the customer?

Regarding jailbreaking and going to jail; I figure that if Apple had a monopolistic hold on its markets (say smart phones), it would definitely try to prosecute some people to make a point. The last thing they want at the moment is to have people being outwardly unhappy with their hardware as well as receiving negative press regarding their products (especially since image is a large factor of their business model). This might sway people to buy competitor's products.
On a side note, if you're going to reply to this thread saying something like "iPhone already has a smartphone monopoly," there are many sources saying they're not quite there at the moment, so check your facts instead of stating hype or personal belief.

For a large majority of people, that device is the iPhone.

A 3% global market share is your idea of a "large majority"?

Try a 25%+ US market share of smartphones. Pedantically speaking this is a large minority, not a majority, but either way it's a lot of phones.

The following is mostly unopinionated and uses actual cited facts.

Of the total cellphone market the iphone is around the 3% mark, although I do not have a source for this. You specifically said *smartphone market*, which according to http://comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/4/comScore_Reports_February_2010_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share and http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/02/google-makes-biggest-gain-in-smartphone-market-share.ars Apple holds 25 % market share. Now android may be growing fast but it will reach a market saturation point. It is worth noting that at launch, iPhones were $600 and Droids were $200 http://blog.flurry.com/bid/31410/Day-74-Sales-Apple-iPhone-vs-Google-Nexus-One-vs-Motorola-Droid and they had almost identical sales figures in the first 74 days. Granted, that is just the droid and not all android phones, but as my previous citations indicate, the iPhone still has greater market share despite lower priced android based phones on multiple carriers.

As far as your data plan pricing goes http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/splash/plansingleline.jsp?lid=//global//plans//individual for a 3g 'smartphone' you will need the $29.99 a month, exactly the same as an iPhone data plan. Even with sprint http://shop.sprint.com/NASApp/onlinestore/en/Action/DisplayPlans the base plan with unlimited data is $69.99 a month, same as iPhone. Im not going to bother looking at tmobile.

Not to open up a flame war but I need to make a quick point on how useful the ability to tether, use linux and flash, I will keep it to a minimal here. I do not mean just on one smart phone, if you are using you laptop, you are sitting down somewhere which in all likelihood has (free) wifi, mainstream consumers(read: non technically inclined people) have little use with linux(not to fault distros like ubuntu which will serve most users needs but most people do not want to learn something new), and flash is a good way to heat up my computer.

If you want to give citations for your 'better' network, 'cheaper' data plan(inexpensive was the word you were looking for, which I still think would be inaccurate) and 'better' data service, that would be nice. That does not include tv ads demonstrating 3g speed differences, some form of 3rd least biased party, please.

Quick, name successful smart phone vendors with high volume sales. Discounting Microsoft (though this may change with Windows Phone 7), Nokia, and Palm, all of which are flailing about and unable to adapt to the current market, there are basically Apple and RIM (which both tightly control their platforms) and Google (which doesn't). But note that Apple and RIM are hardware vendors, and Google is a software vendor: they have different priorities.

Why should we discount Microsoft? They probably currently still have more marketshare than Google. And though they are declining, they are readying a new platform.

So if we take the top 4 in the marketplace - RIM, Apple, MS, Google - 3* have open platforms and 1 does not. Granted, the 1 closed platform has a very respectable #2 position in the marketplace, but to say the only ones surviving are the tightly controlled ones is incorrect.

* - I disagree with your statement that RIM is tightly controlling their platform. Anyone can get a BlackBerry SDK and develop in MDS or Java. Anyone can provide a BlackBerry app "OTA" from their website. There is no requirement to have RIM hardware or use RIM's App World.

If Steve Jobs would stop mushroom stamping your eyelids for one minute, you'd be able to open them and do a quick Google search to come up with this, dated April 5 2010: From November 2009 to February 2010, Apple's mobile market share DROPPED from 25.5% to 25.4%.

In the same period, Android's share GREW from 3.8% to 9.0%.

Weren't you saying something about growth rates?

Not only is there plenty of competition in the smartphone market, but RIM is still the undisputed leader in the US by about 16 percent. Google more than doubled its small installed base (from 2.5% to 5.2%) between September and December. The analysis firm comScore has a press release covering third-quarter 2009 cell phone growth patterns.

Worldwide, Symbian kicks everyone's ass at 47% for the year of 2009 (as a platform), but Nokia "only" sold 39% in the third quarter (as a hardware solution.

The handset data vs. platform data is interesting, especially considering that by listing handset manufacturers Apple news sites completely avoid mentioning Google and Android. Some of the HTC, Samsung, and "others" would be listed as Windows Mobile and some would be Android or Maemo/Meego, obviously.

Despite all the hype about the iPhone, it's still only a quarter of the US market and 16% of the worldwide market from the latest data I could find.

I don't think much of your research. That's from October last year. The report from the same company is widely available for Feb this year, and it has Apple on 25.4% and MS on 15.1%.
http://comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/4/comScore_Reports_February_2010_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share

Worldwide, they both do less well, because Symbian is still holding on ot the lion's share. Apple 15.1%, Microsoft 8.8%.
http://www.canalys.com/pr/2010/r2010021.html

and the number of windows mobile applications vastly outnumbers the number of iPhone applications (by about 10 times I wager)

Worst bet ever. Number of apps on Microsoft's own Windows Marketplace for Mobile = 872. Number of Apps on iTunes = 185,000.

linky

25% market share. RIM is the leader with 40%. Google/Android, gained 6% share in just a year while Apple stayed pretty much flat.

As I said, Apple gets *way* more press than they deserve in terms of market share.