Archive for month: October, 2010

Microsoft may be late to the game with a consumer-savvy phone OS, but Windows Phone 7 is aiming to do right a lot of what Google is doing wrong. Based on what I saw during a visit to Microsoft’s headquarters two weeks ago, the Windows Phone 7 team may be on the right track to pose a serious threat to Google.

As much as I’ve become a Google fanboy, Microsoft is still, well, MICROSOFT. It’s good to see them making a very serious stab at the mobile market. They will not go down without a serious fight. If anyone can take back their market share, it’s Microsoft.

Munster foresees huge success for Apple in the tablet market, but he doesn’t think the iPad will keep the majority of tablet market share forever. The biggest threat? Android.

“Ultimately, we think that Apple won’t have the majority of the (tablet) market share. It’ll probably be with Android-based tablets.”

While Apple continues its walled-garden approach to building proprietary hardware, Google takes the open source route and creates a free operating system. What do you think the rest of the hardware world will embrace? Of course its Google.

Google’s genius is that their media-based model encourages FREE. Free content, free software, free services. This decimates their software competitors while swarming the hardware world with cheap, plentiful alternatives.

Bye bye Apple (well, Apple was really never a major player. They are a brilliant consumer electronics company). Bye Bye Microsoft (for consumer software).

Is iPhone the next American Idol?

The daily audience for apps that run on Apple’s iOS operating system (for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) has now surpassed 19 million users, who spend an average of 22 minutes per day using these apps, according to one measure. That means the audience for the iOS devices is now bigger than NBC’s Sunday Night Football and is just shy of the audience for ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Only 4 million daily viewers separate the iOS audience from that of the No. 1-ranked TV show, Fox’s American Idol, according to data collected by analytics firm Flurry.

Flurry’s chief executive, Simon Khalaf, will talk about this data and more at VentureBeat’s DiscoveryBeat 2010 conference on Oct. 18.

This confirms my own experiences with my EVO 4G phone: I’m watching a ton of video on it, perhaps more than on my TV during the week. Repurposing video content for mobile consumption will be a very big opportunity.