Now the fun starts...

Flash Player cannot die soon enough, if you ask me.

See below. Plenty of competition nowadays ;) They're either gonna sink (likely, flash is such a shocking codebase/does some shockingly bad things), or swim, tho I'm not sure how they can and still keep a profit.

Adobe are trying to get into the web application market. See Buzzword, their Google docs competitor. However, Adobe have yet to figure out how to run data centers at Google scale.

Heh. Flash player has some interesting quirks. Capturing the mouse scroll and ^T piss me off no end. On the upside, it has pushed HTML5 forward. =)

Fun times no matter what, thanks to 2 events. The first and foremost being apple entering the phone market, the second being google entering the device market.
I'll agree, nokia is getting a (much needed) kick in the ass. We're a juggernaut tho.

Somewhat tellingly tho, nokia's looking to shift the focus of profit making onto ovi (and further by creating environment/infrastructure via qt)...

Google win here as their profit niche isn't the hardware, (or the software). Apple kinda win, with ubiquity, but at a cost (they're missing large segments of markets, and outside the US are still fighting nokia, and even RIM for market dominance in their own market). Nokia eventually wins, due to shifting profit focus away from the hardware. Adobe to put it mildly, are fucked unless they come up with some way to generate a revenue stream. SVG, HTML5, javafx, silverlight, even Qt's dui, they're all encroaching upon one of adobes core markets. Agreed, interesting times.

JavaFX and Silverlight are both DOA. Flash/Flex is currently interesting, if only because YouTube makes sure that Flash Player has 95%+ market penetration. SVG and Canvas are both getting there, mainly through Internet Explorer committing ritual suicide.

I really can't comment on Ovi until i see it in the hands of users on the street.

Microsoft were never going to win Netbooks anyway, given their asinine strategy of making sure their offering was crap by making sure to limit its usefulness for the very things people want to use netbooks for.

I think at least part of the Chrome OS situation is essentially Google thinking that with Microsoft deciding to cripple its efforts in the netbook arena (and Apple not even bothering to compete), free Linux based netbooks are going to be the winner in that space -- and seeing an opportunity to take over that market with google branded netbooks using Chrome rather than leaving it all to Ubuntu and Firefox. Basically, its a control play to scoop up and control what is now the Ubuntu market.

You are probably onto something with Adobe. But I think Flash is already in a losing position with Apple already refusing to support it on iPhones. Flash just isn't going to make it out of the desktop space, which means its crashing and burning. And they'll probably spend most of their effort fighting Silverlight, which is not going to achieve anything except cannibalising Flex/Flash developer mind share, so matters only to Adobe.

I don't think Apple will care in the slightest. Apples traditional strategy for platforms that do less than they offer, but cheaper, is to ignore them. And continue offering a more expensive, more fully featured, option, that will be preferred by Apple customers. Plus rely on their current (and unlikely to change much) absolutely massive superiority on app availability for phones. I think Apple already have smartened up their game in the ways that matter (Iphone os x 3.0 is much better at basic phone functionality than os x 2 was), and have already decided that this 'completely ruling the high end of the market and relying on brand dominance for the lower part' strategy that has worked for so long with the iPod is going to keep on working just fine for phones. I think they are probably right, and Android is the only opposition they have to care about (and that not for some time yet, by which time it may be too late).

And of course Nokia shouldn't care about Google, but I don't think Chrome OS changes things much for them -- they should already have been worrying about Android, which I think they have more to fear from, and of course Apple is kicking their arse in smartphones.

"and of course Apple is kicking their arse in smartphones."

Not really.


Kicking it into gear, sure. Kicking it in the US market, sure. Nokia has a wider handset profile range than apple, and is outselling apple in the rest of the world markets due to differing views on what are critical pieces of infrastructure (read SMS/MMS for starters). Nokia is also encroaching on apples domain (comes with music), and taking notes from apple in many areas.

I think it's a much needed kick in the ass, tho :) It's certainly profitted the now defunct trolltech :)

Is that phone sales, or smartphone sales? Of course Nokia are kicking arse in phone sales - they have phones at every level of the market. And their top end smartphone isn't even close to the featureset of the iPhone.

That's smartphone sales. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=985912

And yes, they're kicking nokia's ass. I have the benefit of seeing the inside view tho, and there's some very intresting things on the horizon. Apple are most definately leading (waaaay ahead of) the new pack in features tho.

Ya gunna need to give the Nokia designers tooling that matches Interface Builder... =)

The days of desktops mattering are coming to an end. Pretty much all the players are aware of this, it's just interesting watching how each of them deals with it.

Apple is becoming a device manufacturer, taking their decades of operating system and tool building experience and building out the catalog of embedded OSX devices.

Google is spreading Internet access as far as it can to continue pulling AdSense revenue.

Microsoft are defending the desktop as long as they can.

Adobe are bleeding cash and praying for a miracle.

Nice analysis. I cannot fault anything you've said here. Indeed, with your permission, I'd like to repost it.

Go for it. Please link back to this post. =)

Done

http://levlafayette.com/node/39

Yay! DOes this mean the death of the iGotAPhoneThatICan'tSTFUAbout?

Doubt it =)

What can I do to make it be? How about fire? I can make fire... and lots of it...

It's going to take something even shinier coming along to put us out of our iMiseries.

How 'bout "Fire onna stick"? That's shiny...