Operating system battles déjà vu

Android wins the smartphone wars

By Joe Wilcox, BetaNews

In October 2009, I explained why "Apple cannot win the smartphone wars". That was just a year after Google launched the first Android handset, the G1, on T-Mobile and days after Verizon debuted the hugely-successful Motorola Droid. By end of that year, Android had paltry 3.9 percent smartphone sales share, according to Gartner. My prediction drew loads of criticism from the Apple Fan Club of bloggers, journalists and other writers.

Fast-forward to second quarter 2012 and Android's global sales share is 64.1 percent for all phones, not just smart ones. iOS: 18.8 percent. My how times change. Increasingly, Android and iOS look exactly like Windows and Mac OS in the 1980s and 1990s, as I predicted would be the case.

By the way, three years ago, Gartner prediced that for 2012, Symbian would be top-ranked with 37.4 percent share, followed by Android (18 percent) and iOS (13.6 percent). Opps [sic].

Two days ago, Android chief Andy Rubin revealed startling data: Cumulative device shipments reached 500 million, putting Google's OS ahead of Apple's for the first time. During Apple's calendar second quarter earnings call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer put cumulative iOS sales at 410 million through June 30. Strangely, yesterday, CEO Tim Cook reduced the number to 400 million. WTH?

(More here.)