I first through I would only copy part of this message I received to my email from one of the many mailing lists that i belong to, but then thought this is worth complete, as it also gives some interesting insight towards iOS vs Android Battle:



"The Man (you never heard of)
who is beating Steve Jobs at his own game

Have you heard of Andy Rubin? That’s OK, most people haven’t – Even though today he’s Apple’s greatest threat since Bill Gates in the 1980s.

Andy’s little brain-child, Android, has gone from an idea 7 years ago to now accounting for 72% of the 181 million smart phone global smartphones sold in the last quarter, compared to just 14% for Apple. Android phones are now outselling Apple 5 to 1, with 1.3 million new Android activitations EVERY DAY.

Who is Andy Rubin? He was an engineer at Apple in the early 1990s with Apple’s ‘General Magic’ team, designing the first mobile software platform. He left to create his own operating system and PDA called ‘Sidekick’ – before the ipod was launched. It failed, and by 2003 Andy was back at the drawing board.

Fast forward to 2005, and a meeting between Andy and Google’s Larry Page. Did Larry want to endorse Andy’s new mobile operating system Android? (Named after a robot sidekick). Larry did one better, buying over the entire team, including Andy for somewhere around $50 million, as a way to compete in the new smartphone market. At that point, there was still not a single smartphone using Android. It was simply $50m to buy the invention and the inventor.

Andy got to work at Google. This week, 7 years on, Google’s Eric Schmidt declared victory on the smartphone war with Android, saying to Bloomberg: “This is a huge platform change; this is of the scale of 20 years ago – Microsoft versus Apple. We’re winning that pretty clearly now.”

Today, phones using Android are growing at 92% per year compared to the market at 46%. The growth in China Android is even greater (where Android is on 90% of the smartphones sold) at 2.6x that – and China will have 500 million smartphones by the end of 2013: Double the US market (That’s compared to 200m China smartphones today and only 50m one year ago).

In the 1980s, Apple fell from total dominance of the PC market to just 4% of the market as Microsoft Windows took over from the Mac operating system. The same is happening now with Google against Apple on a whole number of fronts:

The Android store, Google Play, has grown 300% this year compared to the Apple App store’s 13% growth. Google Play downloads will overtake Apple App store in the first half of 2013. This week Google’s map app went straight to the top of Apple’s most downloaded apps, undermining Apple’s reputation of delivering better software. Google is also innovating much faster than Apple on everything from mobile payments to voice recognition.

What am I personally doing in this sea change? Much as I love Apple, we are redirecting more of our efforts on Android apps and Android phones and tablets than on Apple. We’ve translated all our main sites and products to Chinese. And I’ll also be expecting to write about and interview many more Android app millionaires in 2013.

What is Andy’s view on all of this? He prides the openness on Android but, being more of a techie he prefers to let his coding speak for itself.

In 2010 Steve Jobs criticized Android in an open letter, writing ‘”Google loves to characterize Android as open and iPhone as closed. We see this as disingenuous and clouding the difference.’

Andy replied by setting up a Twitter account with his first post being his definition of open – The commands to download all Android’s source code:

@Arubin: the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/ platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”

Win for the robot.

Keep Making Magic,

Roger James Hamilton"



The Speculation part made me to post this in the first place was:

"Fast forward to 2005, and a meeting between Andy and Google’s Larry Page... ...buying over the entire team... ... as a way to compete in the new smartphone market. At that point, there was still not a single smartphone using Android. It was simply $50m to buy the invention and the inventor..."

Makes me wonder if there had been any chance that Google had bought Amiga Anywhere instead and based their Android upon it instead.

Or maybe just whole Amiga Inc. After all, price was just about double back then :)

Last edited by Bugala on 26-Jan-2013 at 09:25 AM.

@Bugala

Thanks for the read. Some more then i knew. Google was my favourite since ages and i love their system. Wouldnt be bad if they bought amigainc for example and provide money, modern coding tools, chrome and other to os4. Ofcourse to not go agains OS4 team plans/wishes even if it would be the owner. But that will probably not happen. Our Frying pan author works at google.

Last edited by Kicko on 26-Jan-2013 at 03:16 PM.

@Bugala

Quote:

Bugala wrote: Makes me wonder if there had been any chance that Google had bought Amiga Anywhere instead and based their Android upon it instead. Or maybe just whole Amiga Inc. After all, price was just about double back then :)

To what point ???

There might have been a point in buying Intent and/or TAO, but I somehow doubt that would have been enough to serve as a foundation to a moder OS.

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

@Kronos

I think that was the assessment made by the Frieden brothers at the time.

50 million, was AI worth 50p back then?

_________________
Sent from my Quantum Computer.

@DiscreetFX

Is 50p the offer you made to them when you wanted to buy them out?

Quote:

In the 1980s, Apple fell from total dominance of the PC market

I don't know how he defines "total dominance" or "pc market" but he surely doesn't remember the 80's in the same way I do!
There was no total dominance of the PC market then, that's why it was so great. Computers had character then, because they needed to be different, and this led to no clear dominance at all.

Maybe he means "dominance of the over-priced monochrome PC with just a beeper" market, but even then the IBM PC was in no way dominated by Apples.

Typical revisionist journalism, I think. Find of made me stop reading the rest of the article.

Last edited by Spirantho on 27-Jan-2013 at 08:45 AM.

@Bugala

It is probably worth mentioning that this article is from mid-December, based on the Eric Schmidt quote....

Quote:

Andy’s little brain-child, Android, has gone from an idea 7 years ago to now accounting for 72% of the 181 million smart phone global smartphones sold in the last quarter, compared to just 14% for Apple.

Because if we were talking about the last quarter today, then Apple sold 47.8 million phones in that last quarter, for a 22% share of the 217 million smartphones sold.

Quote:

Android phones are now outselling Apple 5 to 1, with 1.3 million new Android activitations EVERY DAY.

So if we take that 1.3 million Android activations number, and count them as sales instead (which will probably balance out with taking a 3Q2012 rate to estimate 4Q2012 sales), then that 118 million Androids. So more like 2.5:1 in the last quarter.

Quote:

Andy got to work at Google. This week, 7 years on, Google’s Eric Schmidt declared victory on the smartphone war with Android, saying to Bloomberg: “This is a huge platform change; this is of the scale of 20 years ago – Microsoft versus Apple. We’re winning that pretty clearly now.”

In some ways, this is the same kind of "victory" the netbook vendors were achieving. Lots of units, but very little profit. Apple, with something like 15-20% of the smartphone market, makes 75% of the profits. Samsung pretty much takes the rest, with Nokia a noteworthy also-ran. The rest of the Android vendors --- sell their stuff just marginally above cost.

And the parallel continues in another metric: actual usage. Study after study, report after report indicates that the majority of mobile phone web traffic actually comes from iPhones. On a more anecdotal level, looking around the train during my commute to and from work, I'd estimate that about 2/3 of the phones actually being used are iPhones. Sure, there may be plenty of Androids in people's pockets (or in a drawer at their home), but they are not in people's hands during those trips.
(Similarly, it has always been a rare day indeed when I'd see someone actually trying to use a NetBook. On the other hand, I'd estimate that at least 1/3 of laptops in actual use are MacBooks)

Quote:

Today, phones using Android are growing at 92% per year compared to the market at 46%. The growth in China Android is even greater (where Android is on 90% of the smartphones sold) at 2.6x that – and China will have 500 million smartphones by the end of 2013: Double the US market (That’s compared to 200m China smartphones today and only 50m one year ago).

And strangely enough, if 450 million of those 500 million are Android phones --- exactly how much money is Google going to make?
(Interesting aside --- for some Android phone manufacturers, both Microsoft and Apple earn significant money for each phone sold, due to patent licenses)

Quote:

In the 1980s, Apple fell from total dominance of the PC market to just 4% of the market as Microsoft Windows took over from the Mac operating system.

Of course, the only time Apple ever dominated the "PC market" was in the late 70s, and it wasn't with MacOS. And they only did so if you discounted the TRS-80 as not being part of the "PC market".

Quote:

Andy replied by setting up a Twitter account with his first post being his definition of open – The commands to download all Android’s source code:

For a very, VERY strange definition of "all".

Quote:

Makes me wonder if there had been any chance that Google had bought Amiga Anywhere instead and based their Android upon it instead.

Amiga Anywhere was nothing of value. Android was. (Although in 2005, it was pretty much a BlackBerry clone; Still it provided a foundation on which to quickly develop an iOS clone).

@Pleng

No it's all he found in his pockets or anywhere else !!

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

@Pleng

If we offered 50p for it we would have offered to much!

_________________
Sent from my Quantum Computer.

@umisef

Quote:

Amiga Anywhere was nothing of value.

AA itself was just AI's attempt to cash-in with a wrapper thingy, but Tao's intent was really cool stuff. Very competent JavaVM and you could code in C/C++ too.

And that was in the year 2000. It had everything to be what Android is now and even more. How it all just ended up as an obscure game API that 2 or 3 developers in the world use, is beyond my comprehension...

@umisef

Good points you pointed out there umisef.

One thing I now3 afterwards think I should have mentioned is that Roger James Hamilton is not a techie guy, but hes a business man trainer something.

So I dont think hes facts about technical things are most accurate (as you have already shown), but he is making his point from businessman point of perspective.

And I have to say the same that I have never seen anyone actually using android tablet. I have seen people using iPads, but not Androids. Only way I have seen Androids are "By the way, I have android, want to see?" when talking of Androids or iPads.

I have one android phone (Samsung galaxy mini, i think), but its android version is too small, and its hardware doesnt support high enough version of android for it to be fun enough. I cant even use Holylwood programs with it, and the one game i planned to buy for it, that didnt work properly either.

Its much simpler with iPhone, you buy iPhone, and basically all works. Only some exceptions with my 3GS.


Another thing is also that next time im going to get a new phone, I am strongly pulled towards iPhonex because I already have already put lot of stuff on that phone, so getting new iPhone I dont need to learn anything new but just connect it to my computer and get that new phone running like the old one did.



Anyway. Mainly I copy pasted this article for the start part where he mentioned Android having been bought for 50 Million even there wasnt any phones using it yet at that point. Just didnt have any idea how far it was at that point the operating system so was thinking wether AmigaDE/Amiga Anywhere had been viable alternative for it. For basically it was on same situation, except Amiga Anywhere I had seen running on several phones on videos where Bill McEwen was promoting it. But at least so far it seems people with (propably) more knowledge thinking it was crap when compared to android 2005.

Almost related:

If I'm not mistaken, Nokia sold out the Mediaterminal business and it seems it is still alive in some form. But i'm 99% sure AmigaAnywhere is not there any more.
Sorry, no link to the info for now.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@All
Have you checked the latest news about Jolla, that should be coming out before summer? It has some more Amiga heretage as the owners and programmers have quite good Amiga bacground.

@eha

Not actively following, but kind of keeping eye on it...

They say they are the only truly open platform and that triggered me to dreaming of getting semaless AOS4-Sailfish sync.

Anyway, big thumbs up for them. Too bad that I missed their recruiting event at Oulu, it would have been nice to meet those people.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@Spirantho

Apple didn't have the total market but PC back then in the 80s were more generically refering to all personal computer platforms.

Commodore 64/128 was the dominant PC at the time until the late 1980s when the market was shifting and the IBM PC & compatibles gained market share because of licensing program. Apple Mac did get dominance on 16bit/32bit PC with GUI either equipped or optionally equipped about 1987/1988 to about 1993-1995. Then 1990 and 1991 PCs were gaining dominance but still largely most were still using MS-DOS not Windows. However, we must remember that between 1984-1987/1988, the Apple IIGS outsold their Mac but didn't have dominance of the larger PC market only was the main leader of the GUI. By 1995, IBM & compatible PC (evolves to be called Wintel or Windows based PCs) took the GUI market with Windows 95.

However, IBM PCs and compatible were already taken dominance of the larger PC market by 1990/1991. It just that these systems were largely MS-DOS and most were not equipped with Windows.

In the late 80s, we have the IIGS, Mac, Atari ST, Commodore 64/128, Commodore Amiga and the growing IBM PC & compatibles. By 87-89, it is possible to say IBM PC & compatibles had dominated PCs produced and sold. Serious enough that Commodore made PC compatibles.