Hrn. Henry Blodget over at Business Insider’s having fun with the whole OMG ANDROID IS TEH WIN AND IPHONE IS DEAD thing. In the annoyingly capitalised Android Is Destroying Everyone, Especially RIM — iPhone Dead In Water, he spews out lots of exciting tripe that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny when you examine the details.

Google’s Android OS has gained an astonishing 7 points of market share in the US smartphone market in the past three months, Comscore says.

RIM’s market share over the same period collapsed, dropping almost 5 points.

Apple’s iPhone share increased slightly, but is dead in the water and has now fallen way behind Android (in smartphones).

According to Blodget, then, Apple retaining its marketshare (in a rapidly growing market), matching the competition (at the very least) in terms of innovation, and making huge profits is ‘dead in the water’.

Apple’s share was always going to fall once Android became the OS that any hardware manufacturer could weld to a device and then go to market with a shitty product that costs naff-all.

So, to summarise: Apple’s selling more devices each quarter and making huge piles of money, but because it’s not matching the increase in sales of the combination of a whole ton of other manufacturers who happen to use various versions of Android, Apple’s iPhone is ‘dead in the water’. OK, got it.

(If you include iPod touches in the calculation, Apple’s share has actually fallen).

Let’s ignore the iPad, eh?

Why do the Android gains matter?

You tell us.

Are Apple bulls right that Apple has an insurmountable hold on the “premium” segment of the market and that it doesn’t matter who has the other 75%?

Yes. Oh hang, on—I bet you’re going to say ‘no’, right?

The Android gains matter because technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant platform (see Windows in PCs, Facebook in social, Google in search).

No they fucking don’t. PC’s were an anomaly. I don’t see every TV being made by Sony, or every handheld console being made by Nintendo, or every TV games console being made by Microsoft.

There’s also a big difference between standardisation and dominance. Facebook is certainly not the ‘standard’ of social networking—it’s just the current one everyone’s in love with. But we’ve been there before and web users are fickle. Maybe Facebook will be our overlords in a decade, but it’s just as likely to be Friends Reunited 2 and we’ll all be using WeldedToYourBrain.com, or something. Ditto search and Google.

And the more dominant the platform becomes, the more valuable it becomes and the harder it becomes to dislodge. The network effect kicks in, and developers building products designed to work with the platform devote more and more of their energy to the platform. The reward for building and working with other platforms, meanwhile, drops, and gradually developers stop developing for them.

Bollocks. Devs go where the money is—it’s really that simple. And it’s pretty clear right now that Android is not the place to go, as shown nicely in the linked graph provided by Lee Armstrong. He compares sales across Android, iOS and Windows Phone for Plane Finder. If Blodget is right, you’d expect Android sales to be close to iOS ones and gradually increasing. As it is, they’re barely above Windows Phone sales—iOS is way out in front.

Until Google starts encouraging its platform’s users to buy things rather than expect free, this situation won’t change. And even if it does (read: if Amazon’s Android store is a success), that won’t stop iOS from being a profitable platform—and that’s what matters. After all, note how Microsoft and Adobe still see fit to create Mac OS X applications despite the Mac’s marketshare being in single figures.

Further reading:

• Is Android Taking Over?, Jon-Erik Storm
  
• A Successful Failure, Ben Brooks
  

Sagely advice from Wil Shipley on his blog post Success, and Farming vs. Mining. Although primarily about software (not least the difference between those who create to sell out and those who simply want to produce great software), the conclusion is something people in all creative disciplines should be mindful of:

All ideas suck, because they are just ideas. They’re worth nothing.

My success is because I worked to make the idea real. A lot. All my life. Starting when I was 12, I learned to program, and I’ve programmed every spare moment since. I didn’t become a millionaire until I’d worked at it for eighteen years. There was no genius idea I had. I just kept working, hating what I did before, and working some more to make it better.

And when you’re done with Shipley’s piece, read Austin Kleon’s How to Steal Like an Artist (and 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me), an excellent essay that advocates just getting on and creating stuff, rather than mulling things over and doing nothing

Colin Barrett on the Twitter dickbar:

What about Twitter for iPhone’s existing mechanisms for notifying users about things happening outside the home timeline? Anyone who uses Twitter for iPhone has seen the blue dots underneath the tabs in the tab bar. And they will also be able to tell you Twitter for iPhone can’t keep track of which direct messages you’ve read to save its life — even ones you read in Twitter for iPhone.

Twitter should concentrate on fixing its existing notification mechanisms before adding new ones.

Right on target, I’d say.

I’m also sick of Twitter going on about coherent user experiences as an excuse for starting to lock down its API and mothball third-party clients, considering all of its own experiences lack coherence. It’s one thing that the Mac Twitter client differs somewhat from the iPad one. But when the iPad client—a universal app—wildly differs from the iPhone version (the same app, remember) in terms not only of interface but also basic functionality, Twitter’s talking out of its arse.

Yesterday, I flagged buckets of stupid poured on to the internet by Dell and Microsoft execs who should know better. But someone then had to go and tell me about Brett Arends and his WSJ SmartMoney masterpiece Is That iPad 2 Really Worth $2,000?

Now, the smart people among you will have noticed the slight problem with Arends’s argument, in that even the most expensive iPad is a smidge over $800, and the cheapest model is $500. Aha! Arends has you there:

If I don’t spend that $500, I’ll invest it.

Right. In the stock market, which NEVER FAILS. And by the same token, we should all stop buying anything and invest the money, because there’s never any benefit in leveraging new technology, thereby investing in your life, rather than the stock market.

By all means argue that the iPad 2 is overpriced if you can back that up with an argument that isn’t “but a cheaper and better Android device will probably be released within six months”; similarly, if tablets aren’t for you and you prefer netbooks, fair enough. But don’t respond to someone asking whether you’re getting an iPad with “even if I did, I probably wouldn’t want to spend $2,000 on one,” because that makes you sound like a dick.

The Sydney Morning Herald has a great interview with Craig Mundie, in which the Microsoft ‘global chief research and strategy officer’ makes a firm, bold opinion about the future of computing, which Microsoft has been instrumental in for the past three decades:

I don’t know whether the big screen tablet pad category is going to remain with us or not.

It’s that kind of decisive thinking that’s helped Microsoft into a ‘back on the starting line’ position when it comes to mobile. Luckily, Mundie has some choice thinking on that area, showcasing his ‘global chief research and strategy officer’ credentials:

Mobile is something that you want to use while you’re moving, and portable is something that you move and then use.

I’m glad that’s been cleared up. So, Mundie, as ‘global chief research and strategy officer’, what is the future of computing? Where are things going? Steve Jobs is still on leave, so he can’t tell us. It’s all down to you!

I believe the successor to the desktop is the room.

The room? Look, I know you guys built a touchscreen table while Apple was busy wasting time on the iPhone, but a room? Clearly, I misheard you.

Instead of thinking that the computer is just something on the desk that you go and sit in front of, [in the] future basically the whole room is the computer and you go in it.

O… K… So the future of computing, as far as Microsoft is concerned, is this:

Image credit: Simon Pride, from the film Alien (1979)