What is winning, after all?
People wonder who between Apple and Google is winning at the smartphone war. Some say Google is, others argue it’s Apple. If you were to build a company, how would you define a success? And what is winning after all?
You can learn in business school that, for a company, winning is maximizing shareholder value. Winning at business is about money.
Apple is making shitloads of money by selling iPhones, iPads and iPods. They sell iOS devices and make money. Google is not making profit in the smartphone market directly by selling devices. When people buy a Samsung Bionic Optimus II X 3D, Samsung gets the money, and Google gets the user.
Google’s strategy is to capture a lot of user information to charge more for ads they serve to the users. The more Android devices are used (not shipped, not sold, not activated: used), the more information Google is going to capture and the more ads they are going to display.
While Apple is silently failing at using the iOS platform to serve iAds, Google wins at being the default search engine in nearly all desktop browsers and mobile devices but Microsoft products. They know what people want, what people say, where people are and want to go. They win at the advertising game.
For people who actually make products, winning is about having people use and love their products. Nobody thinks about customer satisfaction when their only goal is to make more money, but people who actually care about the user experience can be the ones who get the profits. Apple wins at the customer satisfaction game.
Now, you can look at the smartphone market and see the companies sharing the Android profits as one Apple competitor. Then yes, Android is winning. The vendors share the money, but Google gets all the users. If you think about Map and Search, Google even gets iOS users. Yes, two thirds of Google’s mobile search comes from iOS devices, but the remaining third is still for Google.
Or you can look at the market in terms of what I would personally call a success: people loving your products so much that they line up in front of your stores, recommend your products to everybody, and still get you twice as much profit on phones as everybody else combined.
It all depends on what your goal is.
