Mobile devices clearly make workers more productive.

Last week I was traveling covering a conference and over breakfast I read the Wall Street Journal (the paper version). I came across this article, Why Aren’t Smartphones Making Us More Productive?  I was concerned. Why aren’t they? Then I read the post and realized it was rubbish.

Of course, smartphones and other mobile devices are making us more productive. Maybe the Wall Street Journal writer needs to find some different sources or maybe economists are having a hard time measuring productivity using whatever tools they have, but make no mistake, it’s happening and it’s like a slow train moving out of the station. It’s going to gain momentum as people figure out new ways to take advantage of mobile devices.

Look at just about any field and mobile has disrupted traditional business. Taxis? How about Uber, which is has driven traditional taxi companies to distraction because it’s much more efficient. You open the Uber app on your smartphone, order a taxi and watch as it comes toward you in real time on a map. It beats standing on a corner with your arm raised trying to get a cab driver’s attention. And it works. People love the service because it’s customer-centric.

How about travel? Take a look at Airbnb, a service that connects travelers with people who have rooms or apartments to rent. Using a mobile and social model, Airbnb lets you search for a place to stay, contact the owner directly and make arrangements. The price is set beforehand, so there are no surprises. The social comes into play because you can rate and comment on the quality of the stay and the accommodations. And it’s working too because it’s so simple and it provides a person-to-person direct link that only mobile devices can bring.

And mobile changes the dynamics in interesting ways for other businesses too. Box customer Sunbelt Rentals, for example, went from a system of using paper binders to using iPads running a custom version of Box. Gartner analyst Karen Shegda reported at a Gartner Portals, Collaboration and Content Summit session last week, that the company saw a 66 percent increase in leases after switching from paper to the iPad and custom app, and reported an astonishing 181 percent return on investment.

Shegda went on to say that Gartner estimated that within 2 years, 20 percent of salesforces will be using iPads. Given the productivity increases of Sunbelt Rentals, it makes me wonder what the other 80 percent are waiting for. One thing I’ve noticed about iPads is that they are a perfect sales tool because they don’t get in the way of the human interaction between individuals. The iPad is a tool that smoothly integrates into the sales process.

And if you get past the selling to the sale itself, you can expedite the process by filling out whatever forms are required and getting an electronic signature on the spot. It’s fast and relatively painless and it’s all done while the customer is ready to buy.

These are just a few examples. I didn’t have to cherry pick them either because there are countless other stories of massive increases in efficiency and productivity being extracted from mobile. Why the Wall Street Journal can’t figure this out is a little baffling to me. The irony is that after saying mobile wasn’t living up to its promise (however you define that), the writer went on to give several examples of his own of mobile productivity increases.

Mobile has the potential to change many different aspects of the business process. All it takes is some imagination. Companies which are reluctant to take the leap may find themselves leap-frogged by the competition or that users simply find more efficient mobile tools on their own.

The bottom line is that smart mobile apps make your workers more productive, no matter what the Wall Street Journal may think.

Photo Credit: (c) Can Stock Photo

Oracle’s business model is under attack from cloud alternatives and shifting priorities as companies begin to support more and more mobile devices.

As disruption from cheaper, smaller and more agile upstarts begins to have an impact on Oracle’s business, it reported its third losing quarter in the last two years, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ article reported subscriptions slid 2 percent in the latest quarterly earnings report and the stock market didn’t deal well with news as the stock price dropped 9.7 percent.

Oracle is in fact just the type of company ripe for disruption by smaller more agile ones offering the same types of services, whether database management or CRM  and marketing monitoring and automation (to name just a few of the enterprise categories in which Oracle has products), customers who once turned to Oracle are turning to cheaper open source and cloud alternatives.

As an example, the Wall Street Journal article cites the price difference for Oracle’s marketing software and the similar offering from rival Salesforce.com. Oracle charges $5,795 per user license with a 10 license minimum. Salesforce.com charges $125 per user per month for a similar service with a year commitment. Any way you slice it, that’s undercutting Oracle’s offering in a big way.

Oracle faces disruption on a number of levels. As a company trying to sell hardware and enterprise software to run on it, it faces competition, not only from Salesforce and other cloud alternatives, but from open source choices like Hadoop for data analysis and cheaper cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services.

When companies looking to cut costs look at the bottom line, Oracle faces tough going against cheaper alternatives. What’s more, after years of aggressive pricing, customers are happy to find  other options.

Meanwhile, in spite of the fact that Oracle has bought a number of cloud vendors over the last several years in an attempt to move some of its offerings to the cloud, it remains at its core very much an on-premise enterprise software vendor trying to sell a stack of software at a time when IT is looking for cheaper and faster vendors.

As the WSJ article points out, Oracle has a loyal customer base, but companies looking at new offerings aren’t looking to Oracle anymore when it comes to enterprise software, not when they can find alternatives that are far more economical — and that doesn’t bode well for the long-term future of the company.

What’s more, Oracle faces the classic “innovator’s dilemma” as defined by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. They are forced to protect their most lucrative clients, and even though they must recognize the competitive pressure from younger, faster, cheaper companies starting out at the bottom end of the market and working their way up. Yet because companies like Oracle want to protect its most lucrative customers, they can’t afford to pay attention to the lower end ones the competition is gobbling up.

Oracle isn’t going anywhere because it has a bad quarter, but it’s the third bad quarter in two years from a company that used to consistently hit its targets and could be a sign that the disruptors are having an impact.

It can try to answer the disruptive forces, but it can’t fundamentally change what it is:  A large company that was created to answer an enterprise need in a different decade under different market conditions. As such, it will very likely continue to suffer a death by a 1000 cuts as disruptive forces attack it at every turn.

Photo Credit:  (c) Can Stock Photo

With so many flavors of Android, is it still a single operating system?

As Android becomes increasingly fragmented, it’s fair to ask if it’s a single operating system or many separate ones. I’m inclined to believe that it’s breaking into separate ones, but a couple of experts I spoke to think as long as generic apps run on the platform, it’s fair to call it a single platform

At the recent Mobile World Congress, I had a chance to play with the new HTC One, which was a nice piece of hardware. I’m not an Android expert by any means, but a colleague who was with me indicated HTC had gone out on its own on this one in terms of the interface and Android fans might find it confusing as a result.

Meanwhile, Twitter was aflutter on Friday with news of the Samsung Galaxy s4. Ryan Faas writing on CITEworld suggested Samsung is introducing its own Android platform (with its eyes on the enterprise). He wrote that with so many flavors, that some of these can “credibly considered to be their own platform.”

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a freelance technology journalist who writes frequently about open source including Android, see it differently though. He says all these flavors of Android remain essentially the same OS even though each manufacturer is putting their own stamp on it. “Android has always been fragmented. Even today there are seven–count ‘em 7–different Android variations ranging from Eclair to Jelly Bean with at least 1% of the market. But, not counting corner cases like Aliyun OS, it’s never been forked. What HTC and Samsung are doing is just adding their own special sauce on the Android goodies,” he said.

Vaughan-Nichols adds, “Now, when it becomes impossible for a third-party generic Android app. to run on those devices then we’ll have something to worry about.”

The Samsung Galaxy s4 has its own unique flavor of Android.

Rob Pegoraro, a freelance writer for USA Today and other sites, who covers Android agrees and doesn’t see it as an issue. “If you look at Android as a way to run apps, it still appears as a single platform–thanks to a lot of hard work by developers that users don’t see,” he said.

He notes, however, that for users, the look and feel could change fairly dramatically from device to device. “But if you consider it as a common interface that you only need to learn once every few years, it’s pretty much forked. You can’t count on something as basic as the back button being in the same spot on different vendors’ phones,” he explained

The problem for me is that every member of my family could have Android phones and they could all look, feel and operate completely differently. Yet they are all called the “Android” OS because at their core they are Android and run Android apps.

But Pegoraro explains it might be better to think of the different flavors in the way we think of dialects. They are the same language even though they sound a lot different. “The difference between an HTC-style Android interface and a Samsung-esque one used to be something like the difference between Boston and New York accents. Now it’s more like the gap between Cajun and Nebraskan dialects, or maybe American and British English: There’s a lot more distinct vocabulary, and you need to work more to decipher the other party’s speech at first,” he told me.

For now, Android gets counted as a single OS regardless of flavor, but you have to wonder if Samsung and HTC continue on their own path if this will continue or if at some point we will have different Android flavors counted as separate operating systems. Time will tell.

Photo Credit 1: (c) Can Stock Photo

Photo Credit 2: Samsung

Sony defined the portable device market when these were popular, but never were able to capitalize on it in MP3s or smartphones.

I’m camped out at Mobile World Congress this week and as I’ve wandered the halls of this massive conference, I’ve tried to get my hands some phones and tablets I’ve heard about. Some vendors have surprised me by the quality of their phones including Nokia and BlackBerry. Others, not so much — and then there’s HP and Sony.

These two were once mighty brands who wielded great power in the marketplace, but they never quite got mobile and as such they have been left behind. Now they appear to be a couple of brands going through the mobile motions because they pretty much have to, whether their heart is in it or not.

Sony is a particularly sad tale because if you think back to the 80s, the Sony Walkman was the first true portable device and people loved them. It was extremely hip to have one and all through the 90s, Sony was the star consumer electronics brand. I personally was very loyal to the Sony brand in those days. I had a Sony Vaio laptop, two Sony televisions and Sony stereo components.

But the Sony brand hit a bump in the road about the same time Apple came up with the iPod. Like any disrupted company, it didn’t react quickly enough to the MP3 player market, which given their Walkman market, should have been a natural fit. Instead, Sony floundered.

Today they have new Xperia line of  tablets and phones. When I went to their booth the other day, I was surprised to see a big counter devoted to the press. Step in the right direction, but I noted on the counter was a big, fancy print catalogue meant to show off the features of the phone — not sure a big old full color catalogue showing off the Xperia screens is quite the right approach these days.

To its credit, Sony did give away a bunch of the phones to journalists here (I didn’t get one) . I spoke to a couple of journalist who received the phones and weren’t super impressed. Both commented that the finish on the back of the phone is quite cheap feeling and they weren’t likely to adopt it as their standard phone.

Then there’s HP, the company that makes one bad decision after another. They have gone through multiple CEOs. They’ve had many major layoffs. They appear to be a company in decline. You know the story of their first foray into tablets with webOS (which got sold to LG this week, who plans to use it for televisions), which lasted all of 45 days.

This show, they’re showing off the new $169 7- inch Android tablet. When I visited their booth they were highly disorganized, didn’t have a ready demo to show off the features of the unit and tried to discourage me from reviewing it because it wouldn’t compare well with existing units on the market. And you wonder why this company has issues?

HP’s last tablet venture lasted 45 days before it pulled the plug. There is little reason to think low-priced Android devices will do well for them.

Both of these companies, once powerful brands have both lost their way and now live on the island of misfit brands hoping a boy, girl or IT pro will come along and love them. Unfortunately for the two companies, it’s Samsung and Apple’s world now and these two are offering way too little, way too late.

Photo of Walkman by  Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com on Flickr. Used under CC 2.0 license.

Photo of HP tablets by Ron Miller. Used under CC 2.0 Share Alike/Attribution license.

Tablets have passed PC sales by a large number and the age of the tablet is here. Photo Credit: (c) Can Stock Photo

The age of the tablet is upon us. The Guardian reports that Tim Cook, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Conference yesterday shared one piece of data that summed it up best. Last quarter Apple sold 23 million iPads, while HP — the world’s largest PC maker — sold 15m PCs.

What’s more, Cook told the audience he didn’t care if the iPad sales were eating into his desktop and laptop computer sales because the future market potential for tablets was so huge, it didn’t matter.

“The projection is that this is going to triple in four years – that’s 375 million, more than the number of PCs being sold around the world. The tablet is attracting people who have never owned a PC, and people who have owned [PCs] but it wasn’t great in the experience,” The Guardian quoted him as saying.

If you doubted the ascendancy of the tablet, these numbers illustrate that it’s happening right now probably faster than anyone believed it would. When I write about these types of changes, I get comments from old-school IT pros who scoff at the idea that a tablet could replace a PC. ‘You won’t someone using an iPad to design a car,’ they tell me.

And they’re probably right. Just because the tablet is overtaking the PC, it doesn’t mean that they are full out replacing every one. If HP sold 15 million PCs last quarter, surely that’s still a big number. But tablets have proven to be able to do a lot of tasks, we used to use PCs for or schlepped our laptops along.

And Apple isn’t alone in the market of course. Microsoft is trying its hand at the market, the same one where BlackBerry, HP and others have tried before and failed. Many believe Microsoft’s hybrid approach may be attractive to corporate workers, but the jury is still very much out on that one in spite of reports of selling out the Surface Pro upon release last week. Amazon is selling a fair number and there are a number of other Android tablet makers such as Samsung that appear to be doing doing quite well — to the extent we can know of course.

Cook was skeptical of projected market share numbers that get bandied about by various firms, and which supposedly show his company’s market share dropping under 50 percent. That’s because as he points out, his is the only company that’s actually announcing the number of units sold. But if you’re selling the kind of volume Apple is selling of these devices, you have to feel pretty good about your market position, regardless of what IDC, Gartner or Forrester has to say about it.

If Microsoft does sell 200 million units as a Forrester report projected recently, it could be at the expense of Apple, Google or Amazon or could be part of what appears to be an expanding tablet market where there is certainly room for more than one dominant player.  I’ll go on record as saying I’m skeptical about the 200 million number — and I’ll believe it when I see it.

For now, whatever brand you prefer — and it’s entirely possible you have different tablets for different roles — it’s clear that the age of the tablet is here, and while the PC is not going extinct any time soon, its days of dominance might be behind us.

Cloud storage has gotten so ridiculously cheap, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t be using it.

We are in a golden age of cloud storage. We can buy unlimited backup on BitCasa for $99 a year or 10 GB for free. There’s also Dropbox and Sky Drive and Box and Google Drive  and iCloud and Amazon — all offer a varying amount of free space and attractive pricing packages if you want more.  There are so many options for such low prices, it boggles the mind.

You want local storage, you say? We can get a 2TB portable drive for around $100. .

Like everything else in technology this march to cheap storage has been steady. My first PC had a 20 MB (that’s megabytes, folks) hard drive.  Today, I have a 4GB thumb drive on my key chain — one of those that’s just the USB connector and a rubber cover. I recently bought a light-weight 1 tb portable drive that fits in the palm of my hand for $99. It still blows my mind that this little thing holds a terabyte.

Yet even with the low cost of local storage, we never seem to have enough do we? Whether we are an individual or an enterprise, we always seem to fill whatever capacity we have.

I have been buying computers for a long time and each time I’ve bought one, the hard drive had ever  more capacity, and I would think — I’ll never fill up that much hard drive space — only to find I did. I’m sure many IT pros have thought the same thing with their storage arrays. There must be some kind of law like Moore’s Law around chip capacity that we will always fill whatever hard drive capacity we have.

That’s the beauty of the cloud. It’s like that old Jay Leno Dorito’s ad — “Don’t worry. We’ll make more. ” It will always scale for you. You don’t have to worry about it because the cloud provider does. I know personally I have at least half a dozen cloud storage accounts. My stuff is spread across the digital heavens because it’s so darn cheap.

Just this week, Bitcasa came out of Beta with a new storage product that provides unlimited storage for $99 a year. I find it hard to believe they can continue to offer unlimited storage for so little, but for now, that’s the price. What’s more, it has client-side encryption, so they have no idea what’s on there and claim there’s no way for them to know — even under threat of subpoena.

Even the most paranoid among us has to like that.

So sure at 2TB for $100 you could back up some stuff and have it locally where it can never be at the mercy of ‘The Man’ –whether the government or the service provider — but when you can get unlimited encrypted storage for $99 a year, that’s gotten to the point where it’s pretty darn hard to resist. And you can get your files anywhere from any device , as well as  mark files for offline access if you know you’re not going to have a WiFi connection.

It’s the golden age of cloud storage. You would foolish not take advantage.

Photo Credit: (c) Can Stock Photo

But these two organizations seem to have a lot more in common than their recent success. Much like Apple, The Patriots experienced a lot of failure before their current 12 year run of success. Then they made a key move at the top hiring Bill Belichick as head coach in 2000. Apple made the key move bringing back Steve Jobs in 1997. In both cases, with a demanding and highly intelligent leader at the the helm, the organizations thrived.

Now many years later, success has spawned success. For the Patriots it’s been 10 division titles,  7 trips to the AFC Championship game, 5 trips to the Super Bowl, 3 Super Bowl Championships. For Apple, it’s been one home run after another. First the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad.

These two organizations both demand excellence from their employees. They both value silence and neither one gives the opposition an edge ever. They are tight-knit and well managed and they have a methodology and they stick to it because it works.

Just this week, their paths crossed once again when the Patriots made it to another AFC Championship game and  were beaten soundly by the Baltimore Ravens, and Apple released their quarterly earnings report and the stock market punished them in spite of good, but not good enough numbers. Both organizations have achieved something few do, but when they came up short, the backlash was swift.

After the Patriots lost last weekend, the level of vitriol on social networks was palpable. Some people were happy to stomp on New England and take glee in their loss.

Same goes for Apple. They sold a record number of iPhones, yet it wasn’t as many as Wall Street had hoped. Suddenly, Apple is simply another technology company, nothing special. All that success and all that cash and people get sick of hearing how great the products are and how many they sell. Enough already! They want them to fall from grace. They wish for it, and when they fail, they take great glee.

And let’s face it, neither is a terribly likable organization. Belichick is often surly with the press. Jobs was secretive and paranoid (and reportedly downright mean to people). Cook is definitely more likable, but the organization remains closed and tight-lipped with him at the helm. When there was an issue with the iPhone 4 antenna, Jobs suggested people were holding it wrong. People don’t like that kind of answer, any more than they like Belichick snubbing an opposing coach during the post game handshake or telling a reporter “It is what it is.”

Yet, in spite of this, each of these individual leaders, and organizations have had an uncanny way of taking good personnel and wringing out every last bit of talent from them to build a product and a brand that exudes success and greatness.

Perhaps, it’s just human nature to want such successful entities to fail, but instead of wasting our time hating the insanely great, maybe we should step back and see what got them to this point — a leader with keen vision and uncanny motivational skills and employees with a desire deep in their bellies to reach the apex every time.

Photo Credit Jobs/Cook: thetaxhaven on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons SA license.
Photo Credit Brady/Belichick: Andrew Choy on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons SA license.

Once again, this week a big Facebook announcement gave mobile short shrift.

There was big news on Tuesday from Facebook, but what Facebook didn’t announce may be more important than what they did. That’s because once again, Facebook paid mobile short shrift and it’s time to consider that maybe the company will never get it.

You may recall there were many rumors prior Tuesday’s announcement as the Technology press speculated what it might be. Many believed it might be the long-rumored Facebook phone (whatever that would entail), but I think a lot of people figured it must be something about their mobile strategy whether it was an ad platform or another thing entirely.

As we found out, it had nothing to do with mobile and in fact, from following along in various live blogs of the event, it was clear Facebook didn’t demonstrate Graph Search on a mobile device and they didn’t even mention mobile, except in the question and answer period after the presentation in which Zuckerberg suggested that a mobile version of Graph Search was down the road.

Perhaps ClickZ put it best when it asked Is Facebook Still a Web First,  Mobile Last Company? If you had any doubt, this announcement showed that Facebook still sees itself as a web-first company. As Matt Kapko writing on ClickZ pointed out, it’s a bit strange that Facebook would continue to dismiss mobile when a majority of its users are accessing the service from mobile devices.

Om Malik live blogging the event could barely contain his disgust over Facebook ignoring mobile in the announcement writing, “My big takeaway so far: Facebook will never be a mobile company. They launch this graph search and it is on desktop browser. How it will work on touch devices, where typing isn’t the key way to interact with the device and information,” he wondered.

It’s kind of funny because I think of Facebook as a young company, and I would think that they would get this, but Zuckerberg is already a vestige of a previous generation. Don’t forget, Zuckerberg launched the first version of Facebook while a student at Harvard way back in 2003.

That was 4 years before the first iPhone, so he cut his teeth when web services were delivered in a desktop browser. But unlike some of his peers who have made the transition to mobile, Zuckerberg and his company continue to cling to the desktop.

One of the great use cases for the iPhone for me is I take a picture and I share it on Facebook. It’s so simple, and would be even easier if you could share right from the camera app. If I had to take a picture then email it to myself, go to my laptop and download the photo, then share it on Facebook, it wouldn’t be worth the effort.

Social computing was made for mobile, but the folks at Facebook don’t seem to understand that, or if they do, they don’t seem to get it enough. The mobile app just got sharing recently and it’s still implemented in a funky way. You can share from the newsfeed, but not if you tap through to the status to comment, you can’t share directly from the status. And the mobile app is still often slow and unresponsive, even though it’s better than the prior versions.

Facebook really needs to put mobile first, but as this announcement shows, it seems stuck in the desktop browser, and you have to wonder how long it can live there, ignoring the very place its users are most comfortable.

Photo: (c) Can Stock Photo

As mobile devices usage continues to rise, we see PC sales decline.

We’ve seen all the signs lately that the PCs days are numbered and mobile and cloud, well they’re the cat’s meow, the BMOC, the big dog.

Oh , you’ll still see PC skulking around, showing up at parties and being annoying, but in 2012, we seemed to make a clear transition from desktop to mobile. Even Microsoft has seen this coming. Hence the rush to the cloud, the emphasis on mobile and the even the release of a Microsoft branded tablet with more coming.

We’ve all heard that Windows 8 PC sales have been slow. NPD reported at the end of November that Windows 8 sales were sluggish as were PCs and laptops in general with notebooks down 24 percent and desktop sales down 9 percent.

Granted it was early days, but Preston Gralla writing on his Computerworld blog after the holidays found that Windows 8 sales were still in the doldrums, and Gralla referenced a variety of sources reporting essentially the same bad news with lagging sales — and some computer manufacturing executives were beginning to express frustration at the lack of Windows 8 PC and laptop sales.

I trust that it has nothing to do with the quality of Windows 8. Whether you love it or not doesn’t have much to do with the lack of sales. It’s because the sales have shifted to mobile devices. In Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report this year, one telling slide was # 25, which showed in the fourth quarter of 2010, smartphones and tablet shipments surpassed PC and notebook shipments for the first time — and are expected to skyrocket in the coming years, while PC and notebook shipments will remain flat. Go have a look, it’s pretty telling. I’ll wait.

What’s even more telling is the next slide which predicts that sometime this year, the installed base of mobile device users will surpass the installed base of PC and Netbook user for the first time. Those two slides tell the tale of the changing demographics in technology usage (in case you needed a picture of what’s become obvious to just about everyone).

That not enough for you? How about this little data point then? Apple reported recently that it surpassed 40 billion total downloads in the App Store  since inception with almost half of those coming in 2012 and 2 billion in December alone. The App Store now has an astonishing 775,000 apps now. There are simply a lot of idevices out there and people appear to love to download apps.

And it’s not just Apple. ReadWriteWeb reports that Google, the other mobile behemoth, and its Google Play Android store is growing even faster and could pass a million apps before Apple does.

All this data seems to agree that mobile is ascending and PC is waning. This doesn’t mean we’ll stop using PCs or that the PC will go the way of the dinosaur, at least for the near term, but it does mean the PC will have less and less use in our lives, and as that is going to have an impact on traditional PC software like Windows and Office for the desktop. It’s a mobile world and the traditional PC is just going to have to get used to it.

Photo Credit:

(c) Can Stock Photo

It’s prediction time for the mobile industry.

It’s that special time of year when the technology news cycle slows down and all tech journalists turn toward those old chestnuts: year-end wrap-ups or predictions for the coming year. In the spirit of looking ahead I’ve decided to look into my mobile technology crystal ball and make some prognostications for the coming year. Maybe in December 2013, we can look back and see how accurate I was (or not).

Here we go:

Buh-Bye RIM; We hardly knew ya

The first one is pretty easy. RIM goes down once and for all. After losing market share for years, and having lost consumers along with it, the handset business will be cut off and drowned in Lake Ontario. No body will be found. I’m sure somebody will buy the other pieces like their patents and perhaps their server business, but Blackberries will go back to being fruit and the handsets will be a footnote in mobile history.

Microsoft Mobile barely makes a dent

Microsoft realizes once and for all, that for better or worse it’s a desktop software company. Maybe its cloud play begins to gain some traction in 2013, but Microsoft phones and tablets? Not so much. Let’s face it, even if Microsoft took 10 percent market share in tablets and phones, it would be a raging success, but I’m going say they get half that. By the end of 2013 if they haven’t reached 5 percent, I think we can confidently call the mobile strategy a failure.

Android gains, but Google rues the day it bought Motorola Mobility

Android will continue to make gains across the tablet and smartphone space, although the latter will begin to flatten even while the former one grows. Google realizes too late, however, that it threw good money after bad when it bought Motorola Mobility. It’s not a hardware company and trying to buy its way into the hardware space with a company that makes inferior products doesn’t help. They don’t make much money and piss off their OEMs. Seems like a perfect lose-lose situation. The only question left is what they do about it.

iPad loses market share, but makes gobs of money

Competition begins to catch up with Apple as Android tablet makers begin making better and better devices for increasingly attractive price points. That doesn’t mean we have to cry for Apple because of their smart supply chain management, app store revenue and high margins, they will continue to make gobs of money. Apple may not dominate as it once did, but it will be fine.

Nokia hangs on, but barely

Nokia won’t go the way of RIM next year, and in fact, will probably see some gains in Europe and Asia, but competition from Apple on one end and low-priced Androids on the other will make it tough sledding for the Finnish company in 2013. We may hear rumblings of a sale by the end of the year as Nokia’s options continue to shrink.