Month: Oct 2016

BYOD And Hardware Sales Growth To Enterprise

In a recent article, Jan Dawson called the enterprise markets “The fastest-growing segment in mature smartphone markets”. Tim Cook had said in 2015 that enterprise markets had seen annual growth of 40% for Apple revenue, and this is indeed massive growth. The magnitude of the revenue was $25 billion annually, only 9% of total Apple revenues in the same period, but nonetheless huge. To put this into perspective, Dell’s peak revenue in 2012 was $62.1 billion annually.

The question is, if corporate adoption of mobile was driven by BYOD, wouldn’t Apple not see revenue growth? If all that was being done was adapting iPhones that the employees already owned to the corporate network, why would Apple see increased sales of iPhones to the enterprise?

My guess is that either of the following is happening in the marketplace;

  1. Despite continued popularity of BYOD, there is a significant portion of employees/employers who prefer to separate work and private devices. Hence purchases of company-owned devices.
  2. The popularity of BYOD itself may be on the decline, due to a shift towards corporate-owned-personally-enabled (CoPE) or choose-your-own-device (CYOD) scenarios.

Either way, it does not seem unreasonable to predict that within a few years time, Apple may be the largest IT hardware vendor to enterprise customers in the world.

Thoughts On Andromeda

It is widely expected that Google will announce their new Andromeda operating system next week on Oct. 4th. There is a lot of speculation on what the Andromeda OS might look like, and the original sources (1, 2) suggest some key points.

  1. Ambitious initiative that is being pursued via merging Chrome features into Android, not vice versa.
  2. Google plans to launch its forthcoming Andromeda Android/Chrome OS hybrid OS on two devices: a Huawei Nexus tablet and a “convertible laptop”.

All this suggests that Andromeda is mainly focused on tablets and convertible laptops, at least for the short-term. Without going into the details of what Andromeda is actually capable of, I believe that this is the core of the argument and what will dictate whether Andromeda will succeed or not.

Andromeda is aimed at Google’s weakness

Google has two separate operating systems for the PC and tablet markets. One is Chrome OS which has seen significant adoption in the institutional US education market, but has mostly failed to make any significant contribution to the general consumer or business markets. The other is Android which holds a significant share of the tablet market, but only for what is often labeled “media consumption” consisting largely of video viewing.

Unlike Microsoft which still commands the vast majority of the business personal computing market via PCs, Android tablets do not appeal to people who want to work on business documents. This is also true for the mass iPad market, and is the challenge for tablets as a whole.

It has also been often mentioned that there are very few Android apps that have been designed to take advantage of the tablet form factor. Ars Technica’s Ron Amadeo examined 200 apps from Google Play’s “Top Apps” list and found the situation to be quite dire. (To be fair, the design of this analysis experiment is not very scientific. The choice of the “top free apps” list is arbitrary, and a control experiment with a similar list for iPad is necessary.)

Of the top 200 apps:

  • Nineteen were not compatible with the Pixel C
  • Sixty-nine did not support landscape at all
  • Eighty-four were stretched-out phone apps
  • Twenty-eight were, by my judgment, actual “tablet” apps

From the above, I think that it is safe to say that the markets that Andromeda is targeting (the PC and tablet markets), are the markets where Google is weakest.

Similarities to Microsoft’s attempt at the smartphone market

The above situation is similar to the predicament where Microsoft finds itself in with respect to entering the smartphone market. Android is very strong in the smartphone market, and Andromeda is an attempt to use that strength to push Google into the productivity tablet (a market that has yet proved illusive for the iPad as well) and PC market. Microsoft on the other hand has tried to use their dominance of the PC market to gain an entry into the smartphone market.

We know that Microsoft’s attempt has largely failed up till now. The smartphone market has matured and is split between iPhone and Android. Although newcomers have tried to break into the market, all have failed to date. Microsoft’s chance was during the early days when Android’s dominance was not yet secured, but they failed to deliver a compelling solution in time.

We can apply the same analysis to the PC market. The PC market has matured and is dominated by Windows. Although the Mac has tried to regain market share on the halo effect of the iPhone and has gained some market share, this has been a very slow process. The majority market is still dominated by Windows. Similarly, Andromeda will find it extremely challenging to break into a market which is highly mature, and where the major battles have already been fought decades ago.

The consumerisation of IT as a tailwind

The consumerisation of IT is a relatively new phenomenon, and favours players that are strong in the consumer IT arena over those in corporate IT. That is, if the consumerisation of IT is a strong tailwind and if Apple and Google ride this well, there is a possibility that they could challenge Microsoft’s dominance in PCs. Given the maturation and stability of Microsoft’s dominance, without some kind of strong tailwinds, Apple and Google cannot win. In other words, the consumerisation of IT is a new force that could change the balance of power in the PC market, and could create an opening for Apple and Google that they could not have pried open alone.

However if the reverse happens, that is if IT stops flowing from the consumer to corporate and instead starts flowing in the other direction, the direct opposite situation can happen. Jan Dawson has argued that this is indeed starting to happen. Therefore, instead of Andromeda gaining traction in the PC market, we might actually see the the reverse which is Windows gaining traction in smartphones.

The OS is not what matters most

When looking at a new OS like Andromeda, we must be careful to remember that the OS is not necessarily the most important piece of the puzzle. In fact, its importance may indeed be minor. More important is the market position that Google is currently in, their ability to execute a coherent strategy, the commitment of 3rd party developers to create software that makes use of the new OSes features, and the broad market trends that sweep across the industry.

As I have argued above, regardless of the features that Andromeda may have, other factors are not in Google’s favour. Furthermore, what I consider to be most significant and indeed pivotal is whether the consumerisation of IT continues, or whether this will be reversed. The fate of Andromeda hinges on this.

Conclusion

  1. Whatever features may be announced for Andromeda will not be the most important.
  2. Andromeda and Windows 10 are tackling the same problem from opposite ends and with inverse strengths & weaknesses.
  3. What will determine Andromeda’s fate is whether the consumerisation of IT will continue. Recent trends suggest that this is questionable.