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The downside to fragmentation

post #1 of 93
5/5/11 at 7:29am
Thread Starter 

When you REALLY need everyone to update fast, you can't.

 

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/iphone-location-update-android-update/

 

(Didn't see a better place to put this so had to start a new thread, sorry).

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post #2 of 93
6/28/11 at 8:09am
Thread Starter 
Fragmented or not, this is impressive.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/06/28/google-now-activates-500000-android-devices-every-day/
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post #3 of 93
6/28/11 at 8:13am
Thread Starter 
And then there is this prediction:
Quote:
asymco Horace Dediu
My estimate is iOS will increase user base by 200 million in next 12 months reaching at least 400 million.
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post #4 of 93
6/28/11 at 12:02pm

Asymco, huh?

 

How much of this article from 8/10 sounds like little more than mental masturbation now?

 

http://www.asymco.com/2010/08/17/androids-pursuit-of-the-biggest-losers/

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post #5 of 93
6/28/11 at 2:20pm
Thread Starter 
How so? If anything the slice of the profits Apple is scapping up now is -higher-, no?

Will any of those vendors be happy if/once HP has a serious contender in their OS?
http://www.fastcompany.com/1762959/hp-touchpad-webos-ipad-ios-android
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post #6 of 93
6/28/11 at 2:45pm

Mark this day:   I will eat a straw hat the day HP's tablet challenges anyone for anything by means of market adoption.. so the day it cracks say, 10%.. I'll eat my hat... hell, if it cracks 2% it'd be stunning.
 

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sam Posten View Post

How so? If anything the slice of the profits Apple is scapping up now is -higher-, no?

Will any of those vendors be happy if/once HP has a serious contender in their OS?
http://www.fastcompany.com/1762959/hp-touchpad-webos-ipad-ios-android


 

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post #7 of 93
6/28/11 at 3:28pm
Thread Starter 
I've got no horse in the race, all I want is more contenders pushing the state of the art forward Matt. And HP at least seems to want to at least take a stab at user experience and interface as a competitive advantage (as does Microsoft, surprisingly it seems) where Android doesn't seem to.

And for HP and MS they win when their OS is used in their devices. For all the Android manufacturers they don't win when anyone buys android and they only get a pittance when someone buys THEIRS. Google is the only winner there.
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post #8 of 93
6/28/11 at 3:30pm

I get that.   I've said repeatedly that I find the android experience kind of a mess.   The problem is, for as much flack as people get, HP doesn't get enough.. their handling of WebOS has been terrible.   They would have to pull a crazy miracle out of their pocket to make me take them seriously from a support standpoint.
 

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sam Posten View Post

I've got no horse in the race, all I want is more contenders pushing the state of the art forward Matt. And HP at least seems to want to at least take a stab at user experience and interface as a competitive advantage (as does Microsoft, surprisingly it seems) where Android doesn't seem to.

And for HP and MS they win when their OS is used in their devices. For all the Android manufacturers they don't win when anyone buys android and they only get a pittance when someone buys THEIRS. Google is the only winner there.


 

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post #9 of 93
6/30/11 at 5:53am
Thread Starter 
Sounds like the HP tablet isn't all that great...
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/29/hp-touchpad-review/
http://thisismynext.com/2011/06/29/hp-touchpad-review/
http://allthingsd.com/20110629/touchpad-needs-more-apps-reboot-to-rival-ipad/
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post #10 of 93
6/30/11 at 7:36am
Thread Starter 
MORE of this please!
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/evolving-google-design-and-experience.html

Sounds like Google has made Andy http://www.folklore.org/index.py / "I invented the UI of the Mac, have you heard of me" Herzfeld as the experience Czar on the Google+ effort, and other than outright stealing Facebook's design on a few things it's getting positive response...
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post #11 of 93
7/14/11 at 5:39am
Thread Starter 
Looks like even the differentiators aren't helping....
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/13/alternative-tablets-the-next-big-thing-or-dead-on-arrival/
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post #12 of 93
7/29/11 at 8:06am
Thread Starter 
30-40% return rates sounds trollish, but if it's half of that it's pretty astounding:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/26/androids-dirty-secret-shipping-numbers-are-strong-but-returns-are-30-40
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post #13 of 93
7/30/11 at 4:43pm
Unnamed "sources" don't impress me with this sort of thing. He'd have to show actual hard data. There's also zero distinction made between manufacturing defects, wanting to upgrade, etc. and dissatisfaction with Android per se.
Edited by RobertR - 8/5/11 at 11:59am
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post #14 of 93
8/4/11 at 1:09pm
Thread Starter 
Heh.
Quote:
splatf SplatF
Just to reiterate, Apple sold more year-old iPhones last qtr. than any other company sold brand-new smartphones: http://bit.ly/rqojF0 $AAPL
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post #15 of 93
1/10/12 at 6:40am
Thread Starter 
I think this really captures well what I feel about Android now.
http://parislemon.com/post/15604811641/why-i-hate-android
Quote:
All of the carriers laughed in Google’s face when presented with the ambitious Nexus One plan. And given that Google had just signed the all-important deal with Verizon, it was never going to happen.

So instead, at the Nexus One launch we got a website where you could indeed buy an unlocked Android phone — for $529. Nonstarter.

Better yet, while they said they were committed at the time, Verizon and Sprint never even got around to supporting the Nexus One at all. That’s how much they were behind the project.

To complicate matters further, behind the scenes, Verizon and Google were arguing over Net Neutrality rules. Verizon was opposed, Google was in favor. Then a funny thing happened. Google started supporting Verizon’s viewpoint on the matter! If you’re looking for the first post where I’m really, truly, pissed off at Google, look no further.

It. Was. Total. Fucking. Bullshit.

My take is it's an OS sold by hypocrites, heartily endorsed by greedy carriers, sold to an uneducated public and is being transmogrified by a million different players into their own individual walled gardens.
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post #16 of 93
1/10/12 at 7:21am

I've already pretty well committed.   The Nokia 900 is going to be the next phone I carry. (outside of my 4S, which is my work-assigned phone)

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post #17 of 93
1/10/12 at 7:53am
Thread Starter 
Well the Microsoft alternative may be a more elegant solution but it doesn't 'solve' any of the heartburn I have with the direction Android took.

It may seem like I've always been at war with Eurasia, er Android, but that's not true at all. I was all for Android when it was supposed to be a real alternative to the Walled Garden Approach. But that's not how it played out and that's why it's so disappointing. I WANT an open alternative to Apple to keep Apple honest. Instead:
Quote:
Android was built on a foundation of good intentions. The platform was supposed to usher in a new mobile era where the power was given to the user to make their device their own. No walled gardens, no censorship, no limits. Supporters of the platform heralded its “openness,” deriding Apple and others for their top-town controlled approach.

It sounded too good to be true, and it pretty much was. Carriers balked at giving up that control and quickly Android became just as tightly controlled as iOS or any other mobile platform. And this is directly a result of Google’s business decisions in the company’s quest for Android market domination.

http://technologizer.com/2012/01/10/which-is-it-google-is-android-open-or-not/
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post #18 of 93
1/11/12 at 6:24am
Thread Starter 
Word.
Quote:
This all boils down to the fact that the technology market is no longer dominated by technology lovers. Google, Samsung, ASUS, Acer, Toshiba, and others like them need to stop acting like the PC clone makers of the 1980s and 90s, and thinking as if they’re building computers for the technically-inclined. The market is a lot bigger than that today and it’s now dominated by people who couldn’t care less about a gigahertz or a megapixel.


http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/hiner/tablets-what-amazon-and-apple-know-that-all-the-ces-tablet-peddlers-are-still-missing/10044

DUH:
Quote:
LAS VEGAS—Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt on Tuesday took issue with the idea that the Android mobile operating system is fragmented, arguing that there is instead a "differentiation" between devices.
"Differentiation is positive, fragmentation is negative,"
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2398743,00.asp
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post #19 of 93
1/11/12 at 6:46am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sam Posten View Post

I WANT an open alternative to Apple to keep Apple honest.
I read that as "I want Android around to force my preferred platform to be better". I, on the other hand, am glad there's an alternative to the Iphone because it gives me the flexibility, pricing, and no contract options Apple isn't interested in. It's irrelevant to me how "honest" that makes Apple, since it's obvious to me they were never going to meet my needs.
Edited by RobertR - 1/11/12 at 7:47am
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post #20 of 93
1/11/12 at 12:38pm
Thread Starter 
Grrr, stupid crappy Huddler ate my long post.

But I'll try to recap: Let me expand on that. I want an open solution to keep ALL the walled gardens honest. Whether those are Apple's, Facebook's, Microsoft's Amazons, or errrr, Google's I don't care.

Google stood up and said they were going to make a customer focused open garden. They pussed out and caved to the carriers in exchange for marketshare which they get VERY low returns on.

Great, you get zero percent return on a multi-billion dolllar business you built from scratch based on lies. Where's your crown king nothing?
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post #21 of 93
1/12/12 at 5:03am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sam Posten View Post

Google stood up and said they were going to make a customer focused open garden. They pussed out and caved to the carriers in exchange for marketshare which they get VERY low returns on.
Great, you get zero percent return on a multi-billion dolllar business you built from scratch based on lies. Where's your crown king nothing?
I have trouble understanding why I should favor or disfavor a company depending on what returns it's getting. Usually the complaint is that it's making "too much" profit", but "too little"? Really, all I'm concerned about is "do I like what's offered at the price asked for?" Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "pussing out" to the carriers. Do you mean that some features are unique to a given carrier or carriers? Why should that bother me? Why the concern with uniformity? My phone has HTC Sense, which isn't on other phones. Is that a problem? Not for me--I don't even use it. I installed Zeam Launcher. Works for me. Whether it works for Google or HTC or some guy who might be confused if he borrowed my phone isn't my concern.
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post #22 of 93
1/12/12 at 6:53am
Thread Starter 
Because the promise of Android was that the consumer would have choice not just of phones but of carriers, and that 3rd parties like Google could provide alternatives like ad supported free phones that consumers could take to their carrier of choice and the carriers would be dumb pipes that got out of your way. That was all bullshit. The carriers now still impose their rigid control and lock you in and put their shitty software and spyware on top of most of the crappy phones they push.
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post #23 of 93
1/12/12 at 9:41am
I wasn't aware of such a promise. I never expected a free phone. I am happy that I have a high end no-contract phone. Such an alternative is the best thing about android to me. I think everyone would like to buy a phone and use it on any carrier, but it doesn't look like it'll happen.
Edited by RobertR - 1/12/12 at 11:25am
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post #24 of 93
1/20/12 at 10:25am
Thread Starter 
I can pull discussions with Google from that era if you'd like, but it is all an alternate history now....

Anyway, fragmentation isn't just an issue with phones, it's goods across the line.

Fight the future says Topolski:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/20/2713165/gadget-sales-consumer-demand-samsung-apple-acer-motorola
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post #25 of 93
1/21/12 at 10:44am
The difference between us is that you seem to view things from a company perspective, and I view things from a consumer perspective. If I was with a manufacturer, I'd worry about how many models/how much differentiation/how often I introduce new models. But as a consumer, I don't. There's no such thing as "too many choices". Choice is GOOD. Choice is what allows me to pay only 30 bucks a month for lots of no-contract smartphone goodness, instead of being STUCK with some "you'll do it OUR way and like it" attitude (my supervisor is pissed off at Verizon because he'd have to pay a big premium to trade in his POS Motorola, while he looks enviously at my HTC.). It just isn't that hard to make choices. In my case, all I had to do was look at those Android phones that would work with Tmobile's no-contract plan. That meant looking at 20 phones. A quick look at the specs narrowed it down to two--the Galaxy S2 and the Sensation. A more detailed look at the specs, price, and a comparison on Youtube made the choice easy. I just don't see people running around in a befuddled fog about what to choose with smart phones or laptops, any more than what amplifier or subwoofer or printer or refrigerator, etc. to choose.
Edited by RobertR - 1/21/12 at 11:26am
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post #26 of 93
1/21/12 at 3:06pm
Thread Starter 
I don't see it from a company point of view at all. I think from a consumer point of view too much choice IS a bad thing no matter what the conventional wisdom might say.

And that article seems to say that these companies are starting to come around to that way of seeing things.

Good, better, best is all you really need. NOBODY needs 27 different permutations of a cell phone, camera or computer. Go look at all the digicams that Nikon and Canon announce each year and tell me how the average consumer picks between any of them EVEN IF they have settled on a brand already. If they haven't it's impossible to comparte these permutations across brands.

It sucks and it its not fun to try to sort through all these bullshit variations.
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post #27 of 93
1/21/12 at 3:44pm
It may be too many choices for YOU, but the ultimate determiner is the Market. If 27 varieties of a cell phone are profitable, then it's NOT too many, by definition. All that matters is what sells. If enough people decide "I'd buy that product if it had a certain feature" (variation), then the variation will be provided. There is no "objective", external determinant of these things. It's perfectly natural to try to distinguish products from the competition.
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post #28 of 93
1/22/12 at 9:53am
Thread Starter 
We'll have to agree to disagree here. There is still considerable debate on whether you are are are correct but I think that the markets are coming around to how I see it, given the comments in the article above.

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_theory
http://www.freakonomics.com/2009/12/02/is-the-paradox-of-choice-not-so-paradoxical-after-all/
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post #29 of 93
1/22/12 at 11:31am
I think Schwartz is full of it. He generalizes from his own experiences and attitudes. It's apparent to me that he's another critic of Free Market Capitalism searching for an angle of attack on it. The "the Market makes us TOO affluent and gives us TOO many choices" line is nothing new; John Kenneth Galbraith (who coined the phrase "the conventional wisdom") made the same charge in The Affluent Society, where he railed against the "evils" of things such as tail fins on cars (of course, what Galbraith was really complaining about was that people weren't make the choices he thought they should, such as sitting around reading his books and spending more on Government projects). The funny thing is that those same critics will often criticize the Market for making people too poor!

I quote from an article on consumerism:
Quote:
We want better heating and cooling in our homes and businesses. We want more varieties of food, wine, cleaning products, toothpaste, and razors. We want access to a full range of styles in our home furnishing. If something is broken, we want the materials made available to repair it. We want fresh flowers, fresh fish, fresh bread, and new cars with more features. We want overnight delivery, good tech support, and the newest fashions from all over the world.

The libraries are going online, as is the world's art. Commerce has made the shift. New worlds are opening to us by the day. We find that phone calls are free. We can link with anyone in the world through instant messaging, and email has become the medium that makes all communication possible. We are abandoning our tube-televisions and landline telephones – staples of 20th-century life – for far superior modes of information technology.

We want speed. We want wireless. We want access. And improvements. Clean and filtered water must flow from our refrigerators. We want energy drinks, sports drinks, bubbly drinks, juicy drinks and underground spring water from Fiji. We want homes. We want safety and security. We want service. We want choice....are people buying superfluous things that they can do without? Certainly. But who is to say for sure what is a need as versus a mere want? A dictator who knows all? How can we know that his desires will accord with my needs and yours? In any case, in a market economy, wants and needs are linked, so that one person's necessities are met precisely because other people's wants are met.
Schwartz CONCEDES that the huge variety of jeans available resulted in him getting a pair that fit perfectly, but says that such an obvious BENEFIT of so many choices is somehow "bad", because if our needs are always being better met, we expect more. Yes, we want and expect more than we did 50, 75, 100, 1000 years ago (can you imagine the astonishment of someone from the Middle Ages at the idea of having and EXPECTING central heating and air conditioning, non spoiled food in tremendous variety and abundance, hot and cold running water, fantastic medical care, instant access to the world's knowledge in his pocket, etc etc etc?) . That's called PROGRESS. I can't even begin to imagine that having fewer choices made people happier (I'm trying to picture some caveman in a constant state of ecstasy because the only choices he has for the day are hunting game all day or looking for nuts and berries, and he sure as hell won't be picky about what KIND of game or nuts and berries). I prefer to think about the wonderful scene in Moscow on the Hudson, where Robin Williams' character is joyfully chanting "coffee, coffee...", when he sees the overwhelming variety and quantity available in an American supermarket, instead of having ONE lousy choice after having to stand in line interminably.

Each of us is free to limit our choices, but artificially restricting them is a BAD idea. As one commenter stated, Barry Schwartz's head would explode if he walked into this store smile.gif. He'd obviously be much happier with this situation.
Edited by RobertR - 1/30/12 at 9:46am
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post #30 of 93
2/3/12 at 9:17am
Thread Starter 
OK, try to buy a compact camera. Pick the best one. Think you can do it?

via bythom.com (he doesn't put permanent links until they are archived):
Quote:
More on More
Feb 1 (commentary)--After getting a few comments on this morning's earlier article, I decided to do a bit of SKU snooping on B&H. Here's what I found in the compact camera range (including the latest announcements, which are already live; I took out the X100 and any B&H "kits"):

Olympus: 37 compacts
Canon: 54 compacts
Fujifilm: 59 compacts (I took out the X100)
Sony: 60 compacts
Panasonic: 62 compacts
Nikon: 71 compacts

Put another way, if you were looking for a compact camera you'd have a choice of 343 camera/color combinations, most of them in the US$200-400 price range. Moreover, you can find fault with any of these cameras. Oh, yeah, that one over there has a faster lens, but this one has GPS, yet that one has more focal range, and yet another one has more (or better [BSI]) pixels... The list goes on and on.

So if you asked a camera salesperson "which one is best" you're going to get a random answer at best, too. More than likely, you'll get sold on the one that's in stock ("The XYZ is the best of the bunch, but we only have it in black").

Someone suggested that all this was just a way to get rid of dealers and push everything through Amazon and a few big boxes. Maybe, but Amazon wants bigger discounts than dealers, so on top of all the other woes the compact camera makers have, they'd be getting pressed for lower product margins, too.

Yet in browsing through all these 300+ cameras I was struck by one thing: almost none of them (it might actually be none) actually do what I would want of an entry level camera. That's: let me put my image where I want it. Not on a card in the camera, but on a Web site, in an email, onto my digital picture frame, over onto my phone or tablet. Instead, they include ridiculous things like an HDMI connector, so that I can trip over expensive cords while I manually thumb through my images on my TV only to discover that the battery goes dead in the middle of showing them off. Are you kidding me? That's part of what constitutes a correct entry level design? (Go ahead, try it with yours. I'll wait for you to find the right cable [there are three possibilities], find an open HDMI In on the back of your TV, and start up your slide show. I might be waiting awhile, though ;~)

It's as if the camera makers either have no imagination about what a user might want, or are afraid to try making something that meets those wants. Maybe both. And then they wonder why compact camera sales are getting pummelled by camera phones.

How about this as a design goal: Design a US$400 product that takes far better pictures than a camera phone, has more flexible user control/options (that are photographically motivated), and offers all the programmability and workflow (communications) capabilities that make getting a picture to where you want it easy? Is it really that hard to do? Or will we get another 300+ iterated compact camera designs before someone stumbles on getting it partially right?

So if you asked a camera salesperson "which one is best" you're going to get a random answer at best, too.

Good luck with that.
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