According to industry sources on Feb. 9, Samsung is in a quandary over its struggling smartphone business in Japan. Some in the company are reportedly saying that continuing the business only causes losses rather than profits.
The Korean tech giant accounted for 4 percent of the Japanese smartphone market as of December of last year, which put the firm in 6th place. Samsung was kept out of the top 5 for two years, and its share decreased from 17 percent to 4 percent.
One day in 2011, Moosa opened the Facebook Messenger app on his iPhone. What he saw was chilling: someone else typing under his name to an activist friend of his in Bahrain…
Facebook was only the beginning. Unbeknownst to him, Moosa’s phone and computer had been infected with a highly sophisticated piece of spyware, built and sold in secret.
It was a sign of a more sophisticated author at work. The implant used a technique called process-hollowing — injecting its own code into a program that’s still running in order to use the legitimate program as cover. […] “I thought, Finspy, that rings some bells,” Marquis-Boire recalls. “Holy shit, I think this is FinFisher!”
FinFisher had become a kind of bogeyman in the security community since brochures advertising the software’s capabilities popped up in a Wikileaks drop in December of 2011. FinFisher could purportedly empower its owner with the kinds of advanced intrusion techniques usually reserved for the NSA. “There was a certain amount of interest just because no one had seen it,” Marquis-Boire says. “All we had were these leaked documents.”
FinFisher was created and sold by Gamma International, an international surveillance company with offices in London and Frankfurt. The Gamma brochures promised remote monitoring and keylogging — they even said they could listen in on a target’s Skype calls in real time.
But now Marquis-Boire had caught a FinFisher sample in the wild, and thanks to the leaked brochures, he had a roadmap of everything the implant could do.
Marquis-Boire enlisted the aid of Claudio Guarnieri, a researcher at security firm Rapid7, to further explore the software. The two uncovered a mobile version of the implant, which came in different versions for iOS, Android, and even Symbian, like a hot startup trying to cover as much of the market as possible. […] Once the implant was installed, your phone effectively became an enemy agent. “I’d be working at my computer and start squinting at my phone, thinking, maybe I should turn that off,” Marquis-Boire says. “It produced this weird dissonance between me and this device that I carry around all the time.”
Instead of a few outposts, they found an army. FinFisher’s agents were everywhere: Japan, Germany, India, Serbia, Mongolia — there were even servers in the US. It was an atlas of personal invasions. All told, 25 countries hosted a server of some kind, each hired out to a different regime and pointing the x-ray at a different enemy of the state.
Marquis-Boire published the work in a series of three landmark papers from July 2012 to March of 2013, each titled with a cheeky Bond pun like ”The Smartphone Who Loved Me” or “You Only Click Twice.” The papers laid out everything he knew about FinFisher’s network, revealing a global surveillance network that was being hired out to some of the world’s most repressive governments. Targeted exploits weren’t just for the NSA anymore. They were available to anyone who could pay for them.
Once the papers were published, FinFisher went back underground. The coders behind the program began to change its routines and filenames enough to let it slip by unnoticed.
Their primary concern stems not from what effect FinFisher could have on their activism, but from the specter of having their personal lives invaded — the same fundamental privacy concern behind much of the NSA surveillance controversies in the US.
“They actually have a system that the government buys, and they get the whole package,” Marczak says. “It’s not just the code itself, it’s the administration, the analysis, the support — the whole framework is provided.”
That turns the same surveillance conducted by the NSA or GCHQ into a market product, available to the highest bidder with no questions asked. “The value proposition is essentially: ‘Activists in your country are giving you trouble? Well here’s a product that will allow you to turn their cellphone or computer into basically a wiretap, a surveillance tool, and you can spy on everything they do,’” Marczak says. “And I think governments are very attracted to that.”
The decline in Google’s stock price in 2014 has been sad to watch. Google started out the year at the pinnacle of the smartphone world, with Apple badly behind on multiple fronts.
Then, for reasons unknown, Google lost its way. I can’t see a single smart product management decision Google has made in 2014, as it relates to selling phones directly to the consumer. It’s in the process of killing every single product Android enthusiasts and developers love, replacing them all with one single product that almost nobody likes.
That contract calls for the Korean electronics giant to pay Redmond a royalty for each Android phone and tablet it makes.
昨年サムスンがマイクロソフトに支払った金額がなんと１０億ドルだと！
A lot is at stake in the case, as is made clear by the details unsealed Friday. Microsoft notes in the suit that Samsung paid it $1 billion last year under the patent agreement.
Android ジャイロスコープに関する Game Oven の投稿が問題の持つ意味をよく表わしている。（もう一例はこちら。）Android のフラグメンテーションの問題は、何をしたいかによってあるいは過大評価され、あるいは過小評価されるということだ。
Game Oven’s post on Android gyroscope support is a nice illustration of a general issue (another good illustration here): Android fragmentation is both massively overstated and massively understated, depending on what you want to do.
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クラウドへ移行した API
まずひとつには、Android バージョン間のフラグメンテーションを減らすことにグーグルはかなり成功している。Google Play を利用する Android デバイスの約４分の３はバージョン 4.X で動いているが、しかしもっと重要なことはグーグルが自らの（地図、支払、通知などの）主要サービスを OS そのものから外して Google Play というソフトウェアのレイヤーに移行させたことだ。キーとなる API プラットフォームを、バックグラウンドでワイヤレスでアップデートできるソフトウェアレイヤーに取り込むことによって、OEM にファームウェアアップデートを依存するのをグーグルは減らしているのだ。グーグルは非常に幅広い電話で使われているツールをいつでも望むときにアップデートできる。グーグルが今年の IO で新しい地図や通知のための API を発表すれば、１年前あるいは２年前の Android バージョンで動くデバイスでも使えるようになる。グーグルのクラウドを利用している限りもはやフラグメンテーションはないのだ。
On one hand, Google has been quite successful in reducing the impact of Android version fragmentation. Around three quarters of the Android devices that hit Google Play are running 4.X, but more importantly, Google has moved its own key services (maps, payment, notifications etc) out of the OS itself and into a software layer, ‘Google Play Services’. By putting key platform APIs into a software layer that can be updated in that background over the air, Google has reduced its dependance on OEMs to produce firmware updates – it can update its own tools any time it wants, across the great majority of phones. When Google announces new APIs for Maps or notifications at this year’s IO, they’ll be available on devices running year-old and two-year-old versions of Android. There is no more fragmentation if you’re using Google’s cloud.
On the other hand, hardware fragmentation is if anything accelerating. This chart from OpenSignal, from last summer, is a nice visualization of the market dynamic.
Android fragmentation isn’t of itself a bad thing – it’s inherent in the choices that Google made. This is what ‘open’ and ‘choice’ look like. And I doubt if it’s possible to have an ‘un-fragmented’ device landscape that includes both $600 devices and $50 devices: some scattering in capability is part of the deal. If you want to have thousands (literally) of OEMs, and a huge range of choice and price points, well, you’re going to have different devices with different capabilities.
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アップル流と Android 流
これは大きく結果が異なってくるという意味においてのみ興味深いのだ。アップル流アプローチを取る結果は、どれもが同じように振る舞うことが期待される。しかし非常に狭い価格帯（スクリーンサイズも）の非常に限定されたデバイスにならざるを得ず、しかも対応可能なマーケットは厳しく制限される。50 ドルの電話を買えるひとの方が 600 ドルの電話を買えるひとより遥かに多いのだ。一方 Android 流のアプローチを取る結果は、より広範な種類のデバイスや価格帯であり、より大きなマーケットになる。しかし最先端のものがまったく期待どおりに動かないこともあり得る。これはジャイロスコープだけの話ではない。ハードウェアで気の利いたことをしようとすれば程度の差こそあれ起きることなのだ。これはまた API が謳い文句どおり動いたとしても当てはまることだ。どれほどのユーザーが NFC［Near Field Communication：近距離通信］機能を備えた Android を持っているか分からないときに（ユーザー自身だって知らないのに）、NFC を大衆市場で展開しようとしてもあまり意味はない。
This is only interesting, then, to the degree that it has broader consequences. The consequence of Apple’s approach is that pretty much everything behaves in predictable ways, but you have a very narrow range of devices at a narrow range of prices (and screen sizes), and that severely restricts the addressable market. More people can afford $50 phones than can afford $600 phones. The consequence of the Android approach is that you have a much wide range of devices and prices, and a much larger market, but anything on the bleeding edge doesn’t work predictably at all. This doesn’t just apply to the gyroscope – it also applies to varying degrees to almost anything trying to do clever things with the hardware. This is also true even if the API does actually work as advertised – there’s not much point trying to do a mass-market Android NFC deployment when you have no idea how many of your users even have NFC Androids (and the users themselves don’t know).
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アップルの強み・グーグルの強み
これから導かれるひとつの結論は、以前にも述べたように、アップルとグーグルはそれぞれ異なる分野のイノベーションに注力しているということだ。アップルはハードウェアとソフトウェアの統合体験（iBeacon, 指紋, M7 など）を下流へ向けて動いている。これに対抗するのは Android には難しい。一方グーグルは Google Play Services を利用して Android をクラウドと機械学習の方向へ、上流へと動かそうとしている。これはアップルにとって対抗し難しい。
One result of this, as I’ve said before, is that Apple and Google are focusing their innovation in different areas. Apple is moving down the stack with integrated hardware/software experiences (iBeacon, fingerprints, M7 etc) that are hard for Android to match, and Google is moving Android up the stack with Google Play Services, the cloud and machine learning, which is hard for Apple to match.
The paradox for developers, meanwhile is that the more open and extensible platform can actually be harder to hack on. When you buy two Samsung phones of the same model and brand in two different countries and find they have different camera drivers and your app will crash on one or the other (or both), where do you focus your seed funding? You have limited resources and limited time and you need to hit milestones to get your next round, after all. Plus, the users who want to install your cool new apps are still concentrated on the iPhone. Again, this is a paradox: Android is the platform best for early adopters and iOS the one best for late adopters who just want something that works, but the market adoption is the other way around. That’s one of the reasons this chart is both unfair but relevant.
Which type of innovation is crucial to a platform? With the current dynamics, people like Game Oven are going to keep doing iOS first and Android second (if at all), and that keeps the majority of the best users on iOS and Apple’s machine turning over – the classic ecosystem virtuous cycle. But if, as many people suggest (Fred Wilson most recently) the most interesting and important innovation will happen in the cloud, then Google’s tradeoff might win over Apple’s trade-off – Google’s comfort zone beats Apple’s.
There’s another paradox here, though: if all the best stuff is happening in the cloud, then you’ll buy the device based not on apps and developer support but on design, quality, fit and finish… that is, all the things Apple always leads on. The web saved Apple 20 years ago, because with the web you could choose the best hardware and UX regardless of the ecosystem – you could buy an iMac and not worry about the software. So if everything goes to the cloud again, is that really an existential problem for Apple?
一瞬 Facebook に登場してすぐ消えたビデオ［冒頭］で Dr. Dre がこのウワサがホンモノであることをにおわせている。「The first billionaire in hip-hop, right here from the motherf**king West Coast.」（スゲエ、ウェストコーストから初めてのヒップホップビリオネアだ）と。
Anyway, has anyone noticed that the loud and visceral reaction to Apple’s multi-billion dollar acquisition of Beats, the headphone and music service company, is kind of racist?
Clearly, some of the reactions may be racially-tinged, but the ones cited by Herrman seem dubious to me. Most of the head-scratching I’ve seen — including my own — is no different than if Apple were purportedly buying, say, Bose or Harman Kardon, for $3 billion.
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新しい領域
過去最大のアップルの買収は４億ドルの NeXT 買収で、1996 年まで遡る。（32 億ドルという金額がアップルが保有するキャッシュのたった 2% に過ぎないとしても、1996 年当時のアップルにとって４億ドルは大変な金額だった点は注目に値する。）アップルは必ずしも巨大買収に反対ではないと Tim Cook は言い続けてきたが、そんな買収は実際にはひとつもなかった。それにアップルにはサブブランド［sub-brand：下位ブランド、拡張ブランド］はない。アップルは巨大複合企業とは反対だ。人種的構成に関わらず、アップルにとって新しい領域なのだ。
Apple’s previous biggest acquisition was NeXT, all the way back in 1996, for $400 million. (It’s worth noting that $400 million was an enormous sum of money to Apple in 1996, and $3.2 billion represents just 2 percent of the company’s cash today, but still.) Tim Cook has long said Apple isn’t opposed to large acquisitions, but they’ve never made one. And Apple doesn’t have sub-brands. Apple is the opposite of a conglomerate. It’s new territory for Apple, regardless of any racial component.
If anything, as Micah Singleton argues at The Daily Dot, Beats’s brand stature among black Americans might help explain why this deal makes sense for Apple: 73 percent of black smartphone owners in the U.S. are on Android. Beats has brand appeal that Apple does not.
The other thing Beats has that Apple wants: its relationships in the entertainment industry. $3.2 billion? I still don’t know about that. But I’m no longer confused about what Beats has that Apple would want.
昨年の Iovine インタビューを見て、今回の買収は高すぎるヘッドホンやストリーミングではなく彼だと確信した。
Watched Iovine’s AllThingsD interview from last year. Now convinced it’s more about him than overpriced headphones and streaming music.
アップルが毎期生み出すキャッシュは 135 億ドル、週当たり 10.4 億ドルだ。３週間で Beats の買収費がでる。
Apple generates ~$13.5B cash per quarter; = ~$1.04B cash per week. Can pay for Beats with 3 weeks of generated cash.
もはやアップルは新しいマーケットに対応できないってこと？ Dr. Dre や Jimmy Iovine がアップルの上級幹部になるって？
A sign of Apple’s inability to create new markets? Dr. Dre, Jimmy Iovine to take senior positions at Apple?
もしフィナンシャル・タイムズがいうように Dre や Iovine がアップルに加わって音楽業界との手助けをするというのなら、Eddy Cue はどうなるんだよ？
If Dre & Iovine are joining Apple to help with music-industry relations, as FT and others have reported, where does that leave Eddy Cue?
アップルはカネを出してもいい！ 新しいマーケットに参入してもいい！ しかし人気ブランドのヘッドホンにだけは手を出すな！
Spend your money, Apple! Get into new markets, Apple! But whatever you do, don’t buy the most popular headphone brand, Apple!
アップルは Beats Audio からデザインの手助けを得られると書いたヤツがいる。お笑いだ。Beats のデザインは外部委託、しかも元アップルの連中だ。
Someone wrote that Apple will get design help from Beats Audio. LOL. Beats design is done by an outside agency, started by ex-Apple peeps.
興味深い事実：Beats のインダストリアルデザインを率いるのは Robert Brunner。Jony Ive の前任者だ。
Fun fact: Beats’ industrial design lead is Robert Brunner, Jony Ive’s predecessor as Director of Industrial Design at Apple.
「アップルの間違いは、チーズやクラッカーで満足している連中にキャビアを出すことが成長の手段だと今でも考えていることだ。」
“Apple’s problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers.”
CompUSA CEO「自分のためのリテール業を競争相手にしたら、居心地の悪いことになる。」CompUSA は 2007 年にヤメた。
CompUSA CEO: “When you choose to compete with your retailers, clearly that’s not a comfortable situation.” CompUSA shut down in 2007.
フェイスブックが非常に関心を持っていて、買収話の確認が取れれば Tyrese Gibson のビデオを自分たちのプラットフォームの力を示す例として使おうと虎視眈々としている。
Facebook will be keen for the Apple/Beats deal to be confirmed so they can use the Tyrese Gibson vid as an example of their platform’s power
自分が話をしたかぎり、アップルが買収しても Beats が業界を変えられると考えるインサイダーは誰もいない。
None of the music industry insiders I talked to believe the favor Beats has with the industry changes if Apple owns it.
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《Update 2》バツグンのマーケティングセンス（５月１１日）
［Beats By Dr. Dre Studio Color Campaign | YouTube］
Android の安全性が確実であるように設計されているとは保証できない。むしろ Android は自由度を与えるべく設計されているからだ。Android を対象とするマルウェアの９割を話題にするとき、これは世界で最もポピュラーな OS への攻撃であることに思いをいたすべきだ。もし自分がマルウェア製作に専念する会社を持っているとしたら、当然自分は Android を攻撃目標にするだろう［と彼は笑いながら答えた。］
［9to5Mac の英訳］
We cannot guarantee that Android is designed to be safe, the format was designed to give more freedom. When people talk about 90% of malware for Android, they must of course take into account the fact that it is the most popular operating system in the world. If I had a company dedicated to malware, I would also be addressing my attacks on Android.
［FrAndroid の原文］
« Nous ne pouvons garantir que Android est conçu pour être sûr, son format a été conçu pour donner plus de liberté. Quand ils parlent de 90 % des logiciels malveillants destinés à Android, ils doivent bien entendu tenir compte du fait que c’est le système d’exploitation le plus utilisé dans le monde. Si j’avais une entreprise dédiée aux logiciels malveillants, j’adresserais également mes attaques à Android« , a t-il déclaré avec un grand sourire.
古い Windows 時代の言い草だ。Android がポピュラーだから当然マルウェアもたくさんあるのだと。しかしある意味サードパーティの開発者のサポートという点で、唯一 Android が iOS に差をつけている点だ。
The old Windows line of defense: Android is so popular of course it has all the malware. For some reason, though, that’s the only sort of software where Android leads iOS in third-party developer support.
Android was built to be very, very secure. The thing that you’re seeing is because Android is an open platform, many people can ship Android in many different ways and so there are some partners when they ship devices, they have an older version of Android. And sure you can have a security vulnerability there, but that doesn’t mean Android isn’t secure.
When you say numbers like 90% of malware is targeting Android, you know, I hate to point out that if you’re a smart business person running this malware company, that’s what you should do. It’s the wrong way to look at the lens. Obviously, you will always see more malware targeting Android because Android is used more than any smartphone platform by a pretty substantial difference.
There was a point in time where talking about share of smartphone sales was a meaningful and important metric. That time has passed. It’s rather like talking about Toyota’s share of sales of Japanese cars in the USA: it tells you something, and was very useful in the past, but not any more.
There are lots of issues and questions about Apple’s future, and lots of different things going on in those charts, including a clear decline in the growth of sales. But ‘smartphone share’ is not a helpful way to think about those questions.
昨年アメリカ人が Google Play やアップルの App Store から購入したアプリは日本人の３割強だった。ところが今年の１０月になると、人口１億２千７百万の日本人は人口３億１千万のアメリカ人より約１割も多くのアプリを消費したと、App Annie の調査は述べている。１人当たりでは、日本人はアメリカ人の 2.5 倍も多くアプリを購入している。
Last year, Americans spent about a third more on apps from Google Play and Apple’s App Store than the Japanese. By October this year, Japan’s 127 million people were outspending America’s population of 310 million by about 10%, according to a new report from App Annie, a research firm. Per capita, the Japanese were spending 2.5 times as much on apps as Americans.
What’s driving this growth? Games, games, and more games. In the past year, Japanese spending on games apps jumped 400% and outpaced spending on all other apps (which grew by 30%) by a factor of 15. By contrast, the rest of the world spends only twice as much on games as other apps. A lot of this growth is driven by good old-fashioned television advertising. The biggest hits of the year all saw spikes in downloads after television commercials began to air.
Apart from that, two core factors are behind the growth: the first is Japan’s belated shift to smartphones. Japanese carriers built a world-leading market for data services on simpler feature phones (such as i-mode, launched in 1999), but were slow to start pushing smartphones. That has changed over the past couple of years. Japanese customers have long paid for downloads on their feature phones, and as consumers have shifted over to the new devices, their consumption habits have carried over.
もうひとつの要因は、Android デバイスの Google Play オンラインストアでは大手キャリアがキャリア課金モデルを導入していることだ。消費者は Google Play に対してではなく、毎月支払う電話料金の一部としてアプリ料金の支払いができる。グーグルによれば、アプリ開発者の収入はキャリア課金が日本で導入されたあと 14 倍も増えたという。日本の Android ユーザーは、昨年までは他の国と同じく iPhone ユーザーの半分未満しか購入していなかった。今年１０月には両者の比は同じになり、日本は Android ユーザーが iPhone ユーザーと同じだけ購入する世界でも唯一の国となった。
The other reason is that the Google Play app store for Android devices operates a carrier-billing model with the biggest operators. This means that consumers can pay for their app downloads as part of their monthly phone bill rather than in the app store itself. According to Google, revenue to app developers jumped almost 14-fold after carrier billing was introduced in Japan. Until last year, Android users in Japan, like their counterparts in the rest of the world, spent less than half as much as iPhone users. By October this year, the two groups were equal, making Japan the only country in the world where Android users spend as much as their iPhone-using brethren.
Two farmers bought a truckload of watermelons, paying five dollars apiece for them. Then they drove to the market and sold all their watermelons for four dollars each. After counting their money at the end of the day, they realized that they’d ended up with less money than they’d started with.
“The latest numbers are in: Android is on top, followed by iOS in a distant second. There is no denying Android’s dominance anymore. There is no way even the most rabid Apple fanboy can deny that iOS is in second place now. Android is winning.”
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マーケットシェア神話を打破するため John Kirk は精緻な議論を展開するのだが、随所で使われる譬えがバツグンにオモシロい。
Scoring by market share alone and ignoring profit is like saying that a baseball team won because it had more hits when the other team scored more runs. Scoring by market share alone and ignoring profit is like saying that a football team won because it gained more yards when the other team scored more points. Scoring by market share alone and ignoring profit is like saying that a hockey team won because it had more shots on goal when the other team had more goals.
Imagine, for example, that Apple were a hamburger chain who made more money than McDonalds, Burger King, and Wendys combined, but only sold 5% of the total hamburgers. Would anyone seriously contend that Apple was “losing” the hamburger wars?
Android accounts for approximately 70% of global smartphone shipments and 29% of global profits. This means that the average Android manufacturer creates just .41% of profit for each point of market share (0.29/0.70 = .414). In other words, the average Android manufacturer needs to capture 2.4 points of market share just to increase their market profit by 1%.
Such a low fair share profit index may indicate that Android manufacturers are:
– Having difficulty differentiating their product;
– Sacrificing profits in order to buy market share (the “race to the bottom”);
– Unable to reach economies of scale in the manufacturing process.
Take a good hard look at the chart, above, then go back and re-read the headlines I listed at the start of this article. What each and every one of those headlines is contending is that Android is winning and Apple is losing because Apple doesn’t control the green portion of the chart, above.
I mean, honest to goodness, take a look at the total units sold compared to the paltry profits obtained from those green sales. Who in their right mind would even WANT that market share?
Not only do the high priests of market share have it wrong, they have it exactly backwards. The company with the lower market share and the higher profits has all of the leverage. The goal is to INCREASE, not decrease, the ratio of profits to market share. Increasing market share at the cost of profits is a recipe for disaster, not a formula for success.
Apple may or may not do well in the future but right now, and contrary to popular belief, they are winning the smartphone wars and winning them handily.
Not only is market share not the best way to evaluate the relative positions of competitors but, without context, it is one of the worst. Assuming that market share will always bring you success is like assuming that a bigger truck will always bring you bigger profits. It’s literally a joke.
maclalala2 