I don’t do the Gruber-style ‘claim chowder’ thing, but if I did, I’d be filing away Pyramid Research’s Why Windows Phone Will Beat Android for future reference. The article’s market share estimates for smartphones seems a bit on the bonkers side to me.

In short:

• Android growth will slow dramatically in 2011 and pretty much plateau thereafter.
• Windows Phone will spike from fuck-all to a third of the market this year, rocketing past Android within 12 months.
• iOS and BlackBerry will be the losers, with declining market shares UNTIL THE END OF TIME (2015).

Pryamid yadders on about it blah blah 51 markets blah extrapolating data for the rest of the world blah blah projects based on demand projections, but the main arguments appear to be:

• Nokia is super-powerful and with Microsoft by its side, the pair will RULE THE WORLD, not least because Nokia will bring down the price of smartphones (you know, like Android already has).
• WP will get loads of traction for being late to the party and going LOOK AT MY NEW SHOES!
• Vendors such as Samsung, LG and Sony are “placing their bets on WP”, which “may” remove the multivendor strategic advantage of Android (rather than, say, ensuring those companies have no focus whatsoever).
• iOS is screwed, because Apple “only runs on hardware manufactured by the vendor”.

We’ll see.

iFlowReader is closing and in a candid open letter, the service blames Apple for “changing the rules in the middle of the game”.

Facebook Indie Games argues:

If you are an iOS developer then no matter how much money you’re making diversify now. If iFlowReader had put out HTML5, Flash, and Android apps while times were good they may be in a different position now. Still painful but at least sustainable.

It’d be great to have some figures to back this up across a number of app/game types. I agree that, in theory, diversification is a good thing, and—from a business standpoint—a platform-agnostic approach (even if you build specific delivery mechanisms for each platform) enables you to cast a wider net.

But all we hear about these days is that iOS device owners have been trained to buy content and so they do so, but Android owners want free, and desktop/laptop users often also moan when presented with firewalls and paid content, preferring the free route as well.

So while it’s great to argue that iFlowReader would still be in a sustainable position had it also created an Android app and an HTML5/Flash version of its offering, there’s absolutely no guarantee that’s the case, just as there’s no guarantee even the most popular iOS app and game offerings could survive if Apple saw fit to ‘force’ them off the platform.

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.

Harry Marks on ‘good enough’ isn’t good enough:

Google’s philosophy: “How much stuff can we cram into this thing that works well enough?”

Apple’s philosophy: “We can’t do everything, but what features can we perfect so they’re easy and fun to use?”

Apple’s far from perfect, and it has some seriously questionable desktop UI ideas in the upcoming version of Mac OS X (including an absolutely hideous new ‘skin’ for iCal), but it often works hard to get the details right.

Justin Williams on trading an iPad for a Xoom:

Honeycomb as an OS supports rotating the device into both portrait and landscape, but rotation is not nearly as fluid and instantaneous as on iOS. In fact, it is so slow I often wonder if the device has registered that I changed the device’s orientation. After several days, I ended up just setting a preference to disable rotation on the device and have it stay in landscape permanently.

When Apple dropped the rotation lock from the iPad, I was annoyed, but only because I wanted the option to periodically lock it. However, to think of a device almost forcing me to lock its orientation because of poor performance is just crazy.

Mind you, it remains to be seen whether ‘good enough’ will do regarding tablets. It certainly has when it comes to PCs, but less so with smartphones—many users seemingly demand a good experience now. I hope that this will be the case in the tablet space, not so Apple can beat Google, but so Google will strive to better the experience and so challenge Apple to keep bettering its products too. The worst-case scenario is when ‘good enough’ wins the day and companies continue shovelling out third-rate crap, enabling everyone—including the field’s leaders— to become complacent and lazy.

Greg Sandoval for CNet.com on Google Music:

While Google and Levine have negotiated to obtain licences from the four top labels for over a year, the service will appear first in beta without licensing from the labels.

That’s sure to go down well with record labels, just like Amazon’s cloud service is going down well with them. And by well, I mean ‘well’ in the sense of ‘not well at all, due to them spitting fury and going GRRARRGGHH’. Apple’s trying to get record labels on board for its cloud music service, so will record labels go with unlicensed models just to screw the big evil (Apple), or will they finally recognise that Apple’s domination in the digital music space is also making them money? I wouldn’t bet on the latter, sadly.

It’s also worth noting that these online services appear in part to be relying on fair-use laws. This is why they are rolling out in the US. In the UK, they’ve a much tougher battle, given that the UK essentially lacks even basic fair-use law. For example, it’s not legal in the UK to copy any media, even for personal use. The only exceptions are time-shifting of television content and backing up software, although more recent legislation demands that the second of those things not circumvent copyright protection. That the BPI has in the past been quoted as saying it won’t sue people for ripping CDs to use the music on iPods is irrelevant, because that’s very different from legal precedent.

The CNet.com article also quotes Google exec Zahavah Levine:

While the service is still in beta, users will be able to join by invitation only. Initially, to access the service, users will require a browser that supports Flash — that means no Apple devices — or on any Android device that’s version 2.2 or higher, Levine said. Currently the service will start off in the United States only and will be free.

Sounds great. I can’t wait to get stuttering music playback on a Flash-based browser. Still, luckily for Google, Amazon hasn’t updated its own cloud player so that it works with iOS, or Google’s decision to run with the ‘open’ technology of Flash for the future of music playback outside of Android would look a bit stupid.

*cough*Amazon Cloud Player works on iOS devices all of a sudden (9to5 Mac)*cough*

Oh.