The real question is, winning what? Take a look at this mobile industry profit share data.
Where on that chart do vendors who have adopted Android start seriously stealing profit share away from Apple? Nowhere.
The key thing to understand about Android is that its market share growth has been driven almost entirely by handset vendors who where never able to field serious mobile operating systems of their own, who are now ditching the systems they previously used in favor of Android. Though it’s often framed very differently, this in-place substitution has very little direct relevance to Apple.
To give a more concrete illustration, imagine that the handset market consists of four companies, A, B, C and D, each with 25% market share, and each selling a single model of phone (call these Phone-A, Phone-B, etc.) that runs an OS developed by the company that makes the phone (call these OS-A, OS-B, etc.). Now, let’s say companies C and D decide “Hey, OS-C and OS-D are actually kind of terrible. Let’s both switch to using OS-E, this new open source mobile OS”.
OS-E will immediately have 50% market share, while OS-A and OS-B still have just 25% each.
What the pundits declaring Android victory right now are doing is stepping in at this point and declaring that OS-E has “won” over OS-A and OS-B because it now has twice as much market share as either one. But you really have to ask the question… has anyone won anything? If so, who? And exactly what have they won?
As far as I can see, the answers to these questions are “no”, “nobody” and “nothing”.
I suspect some pundits are having so much trouble understanding this because if OS-E were a licensed commercial product, there would be a winner, namely the company that owned OS-E. They’re conceptualizing this market as Google = Microsoft, HTC = Dell, Samsung = HP, etc. But this is wrong. There is no equivalent of Microsoft in this market. There is no discrete entity that owns Android (in any useful sense) and aggregates benefits from all Android handsets sold by all vendors.
