So here’s the thing about the smartphone market: there are way too many of them.
The year 2010, JMP Securities analyst Samuel Wilson asserted in a report this morning, “should be the year of the shakeout in smartphones.” He believes most of the market share and carrier focus will consolidate around three vendors.
In theory, getting users to ditch one Internet search engine for another should be an easy sell. But doing so is likely to cost Microsoft every penny of the roughly $100 million it plans to spend on an advertising campaign that starts Wednesday for its new Bing search engine.
In economist speak, there are virtually no “switching costs” for a consumer that wants to change from one search engine to another, other than the burden of typing Bing.com into a Web browser instead of Google.com.
Microsoft is about to face a test of whether it can finally put the brakes on its loss of market share in Web browsers.
The company is expected to release a final version of Internet Explorer 8 this week, a new Web browser that consists mostly of small improvements designed to make surfing the Internet more productive, rather than radical overhauls.
One odd thing about the current state of the wireless phone market is that while demand for handsets seems to be in free fall–Canaccord Adams’s latest forecast, for instance, has 2009 units down 26 percent–the U.S. wireless carriers all seem fairly upbeat on their growth prospects for 2009.
Nokia (NOK) this morning warned that it now expects its mobile device market share in the third quarter to be down from the second quarter. The company had previously said it expected its share of the market to be sequentially flat.
Google will have 90% search market share in the U.S. one year from now. That’s an insane prediction, I was told, after I made it in front of a half dozen of the most important public market investors in the tech world at a conference recently. It was midnight and folks were on their second or third Macallan 25, but folks immediately sobered up. How on earth would Google raise its U.S. market share 20 points in one year–that’s impossible, one person replied. The perfect storm recently arrived and, after all, Google jumped 10% over the last year. Frankly, I don’t see why the Google market-share train wouldn’t accelerate, given the following factors …
Earlier today we noted that two different Web metrics showed MySpace losing ground and remarked that the News Corp. unit, which normally works hard to promote growth statistics, hadn’t squawked in protest. Two hours later came this press release: “MYSPACE MARKET SHARE GROWS IN TYPICALLY INACTIVE PERIOD.”
We’re running the full release at the end of the story, but we’ll sum it up here: The headline isn’t accurate–there’s no data showing MySpace’s market share increasing.
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