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Comment by mjfern | Hacker News Reader

A big question for me is what are the implications for Apple iOS given the quick diffusion of the Android OS. Will Apple iOS and the iPhone go the way of the Macintosh? A niche player in a very big market?

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Once the iPhone is available on more networks, I can see these numbers changing DRASTICALLY.

Here in Canada, the iPhone is available on all carriers and you rarely see an Android phone. The iPhone totally dominates the market. Most smart phones are iPhones and Blackberrys.

It's pretty hard to buy an Android phone in Canada actually. I live in Montreal and I'm an iPhone 3G owner, and for the last month or so every time I walk by a phone kiosk in a mall, or a Bell or Rogers store, I ask if they sell Android phones. The answer is usually "No", but occasionally "Yes". I think Bell is the only company that actually let me look at an Android phone itself, all others have told me that I'd have to buy one without seeing it first.

It's almost like the carriers here are trying to hide the Android phones. Anyway, I am certain that low Android adoption in Canada has more to do with it being difficult to get than about consumer desire.

If a developer and nerd who knows about Android (me, for example) has a hard time buying one, think about the average consumer. There's no way an average Joe would buy an Android phone in Canada over an iPhone.

I've been trying to buy the Samsung Galaxy S for a week but they've been completely sold out in all of Montreal and Laval until today. This afternoon I finally found a FutureShop that had one.

And they refused to sell it to me.

The girl at the counter said that because it's such a popular phone they only sell it with 3 year contracts.

I bought the at&t version on ebay a few hours ago but still, it's ridiculously hard to get an Android phone whereas iPhones are everywhere and pushed hard.

Really interesting. Here in Slovenia (Europe), iphone is not even officially available for purchase (people that want it, mostly go to Italy to buy it). On the other hand, Android is everywhere. Htc desire, Samsung Galaxy S, SE experia x10, Motorola Milestone ... you name it. And people buy them a lot.

I didn't have any problems getting a Droid/Milestone from Future Shop. Runs on the Telus network.

Here in the UK the iPhone is on all carriers and 20% of the market is Android.

Seems like Apple is following the same plan as before: keep hardware closed, keep OS closed. Microsoft beat them because they provided a platform on which hardware manufacturers could compete.

Everyone says this but there was so much more going on I think it's a bit silly to pretend that "open v closed" is a safe way to summarize "Microsoft v Apple" in the 80's/90's.

Open vs. closed is perhaps misleading, but at the very least it's obvious that MS targeted high-volume sales with Windows while Apple targeted low-volume sales with the Mac / Mac OS. Apple built in a huge profit margin on its end-to-end system, putting it out of reach of much of the market. MS built in a smaller per-unit profit on its OS, but since the incremental cost of software is negligible this put them in a much better position since increased volume increases their profit margin almost without limit.

Microsoft also had a first-to-market advantage with early versions of Windows, and they also gained from almost no productivity app competiton back in the 1990s.

So what you're saying is further multiplied by all the businesses who chose Win 95 over Mac OS 8, then stuck with Windows when upgrading their equipment.

How was this first-to-market advantage???

Well, they also had 3 bad CEO, they tried to sell too many computer models, were spread too thin, had terrible stock management, almost killed themselves with the cloning program, attempted a rewrite that got them stuck in an old OS for ages without a plan B, and there was no internet at the time.

On top of that add that Microsoft was making a lot of money from their OS and Google doesn't...

I don't see why you need to see the world in terms of easy patterns. I'd say that enough variables have changed since then that any prediction based on analogies is very uncertain.

A minority but not a niche. Between iPads, iPod Touches, and iPhones they're going to have a sizable chunk of the mobile market one way or another. The other unknowable factor is how engaged iOS device owners are in buying third party apps/content compared to Android users. If the average iOS user buys 2x the number of apps compared to the average Android user Apple's minority market share is effectively doubled for developers who want to sell their applications instead of relying on advertising support.

The first thing I find interesting is that the iPhone is pretty much the only apple product which you don't really pay a premium for (outside of AT&T's current iphone only phone and data plans). I think this makes it much more competitive in the market place, as opposed to their PCs.

Second is that the iPhone still has a slim apps edge (though its narrowing quickly, Android is very close to parity. One thing that kept many folks on MS products were the apps built for that specific to Windows (Office primarily). I don't think you're going to see the same phenomenon in the mobile app space.

So assuming you see the iphone on another carrier (and soon) I think you'll see the marketplace pretty evenly (50% +- 10) split between iPhone and Android for some time.

You don't really pay a premium for macs either. They don't bother to cater to the bottom end of the market, you don't get as many hardware configurations and options, and a machine that seems competitive at introduction will seem dated and expensive 11 months later to those who don't understand how to play the product cycles. But in the markets they bother to enter, Apple will generally produce a couple of quirky but competitive options, often surprisingly so at introduction but remaining at that level as the competition moves higher in spec and lower in price. So all in all very much like the iPhone.

Many differences here...

1) Apple had a large advantage over Microsoft too... they just wasted it. Those were the dark days of Apple: MacOS 7 was alright but less than brilliant and then they got stuck with the Copland project (the Mac version of project Longhorn). In the meantime Microsoft got Windows 95 out, and had several years to solidify its position.

2) Apple sold expensive computers back in the days. I don't mean the high end like today but actually expensive. The idea was that if there's so much demand we may as well milk the cow for all it's got. If I remember correctly Steve Jobs believed in lowering the price and going for marketshare, whereas Sculley thought better to get as much money as they could out of it. Eventually the latter one. This was another reason that made Apple lose marketshare

3) The customers for iPhones, Android phones or other smartphones are in reality the carriers. And they are very worried of losing their bargaining advantage (plenty of supply from different companies, but only few carriers to buy them). Hence I expect they'll try to avoid having anyone get a large marketshare. They may back Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM and Nokia as it is to their advantage.

Finally a last difference is that Microsoft made a ton of money from their Windows product. Google is making little money from their Android. I am not sure what the implications of this will be, but it may matter a lot.

Apple wants to be a niche player - where they can control the margins. Android's strength and weakness is that it's a commodity OS, which means phone manufacturers are falling over themselves to do their own model because it's easy and profitable. Yet many, are also continuing to work on their own high end proprietary alternatives for the long term.

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