On iOS, Android, Skype and any other tech: there’s not always one winner
As reported here before, Henry Blodget has argued a number of times that the iPhone is dead in the water. His main reason is that there can only be one winner in any single tech field:
Technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant platform (see Windows in PCs, Facebook in social, Google in search).
Given that even the ageing iPhone 3GS is still outselling many new Android devices in the USA (All Things Digital), it’s increasingly clear (if it wasn’t before) that Blodget is talking crap.
Microsoft’s purchase of Skype has ushered in similar comments, with people calling Microsoft bonkers to splash out $8.5 billion on a service that’s clearly going to be crushed by Google at some point. But Ben Horowitz offers a different take in his article that provides background on Andreessen Horowitz’s acquisition, 18 months ago, of the service from eBay.
Many observers believed that as the world inevitably transitioned to mobile and web, Skype would be left in the dust [and we] soon faced full frontal assaults from the both Google and Apple.
These attacks were Google’s free competitor to Skype, aggressively marketed to Gmail users, and Apple’s FaceTime, heavily advertised and baked into iOS devices and Macs.
Horowitz reveals the result of these two titans attacking Skype:
Skype new users and usage growth has accelerated since Google’s launch, culminating in:
500,000 new registered users per day
170 million connected users
30 million users communicating on the Skype platform concurrently
209 billion voice and video minutes in 2010
[And] 50 million users have downloaded Skype’s iPhone product since the release of Apple’s Facetime.
But, yeah, technology platform markets tend to standardise around a single dominant platform.
An argument could be made that Skype *is* the single, dominant platform. As of right now, Facetime is at best a novelty, and Goole’s Video Chat is a joke. Skype is the service people actually use, like Windows, Google, and Facebook.
I’m not saying Blodget is right. He’s probably not; there clearly are technology platforms where multiple manufacturers can compete, like videogame consoles, and mobile phones. I’m merely saying that Skype isn’t a counter-example to his claim.