As I kept hearing more and more about  ”Android’s Dominance” I was seeing quite the opposite in the real-world. I operate and assist clients with a number of sites and, as a result, I have visibility into tracking data for many sites. What that information showed, in spot samples, was overwhelming iOS dominance and, in particular, iPhone dominance. It was glaring. Something didn’t add up.

I was also seeing a staggering shift away from desktop/laptop computers (Windows and Mac) to mobile devices, particularly over the past six months.

So I decided to look at the data more closely to see if I could find any indications of this supposed “Android Dominance” and to see how real this apparent shift to mobile is.

Below I present two info-graphics. Both are ”how people accessed the web.” The first is from early 2010 and the other is basically now, very current data (the first 10 weeks or so of 2012).

How People Access The Web 2010 - © Copyright telEvolution, Inc.

How People Access The Web 2012 - © Copyright telEvolution, Inc.

Wow!

I first put together the 2012 chart. Once I had that in hand, in this visual form, I found myself compelled to look back to how much things had changed. So I put together the 2010 chart, thinking 2010 is not that long ago. The iPad was out at that time. iPhone had been out for two years.

To say I was surprised by the shift from 2010 to 2012 would be a colossal understatement.

In terms of the 2012 picture, when you see it this way, the so-called dominance of Android is put in more realistic perspective. Also obvious is the Android fragmentation.

At the same time it shows, rather dramatically, just how dominant Apple is in the overall mobile space and, in particular, iPhone. That iPhone pie slice in the 2012 info-graphic is just staggering, visually. Almost as dramatic, visually, is the fragmentation of the Android segment. And that 42% figure is not just 42% of iOS but actually 42% of the entire mobile space! Nothing else comes even close to that dominance. People may well be buying Android devices, but they are clearly using their iPhones.

If you’re wondering, the 0.3% “All Other” segment is things like game consoles, Playstation, Wii, Google TV, connected TVs etc. The only reason that even gets a label is because I was surprised how small that segment was. People watch Netflix on those boxes, but they apparently don’t use them to surf the web very much.

It’s also kind of interesting, but probably not all that meaningful, that the Mac pie stayed about the same size overall between 2010 and 2012, about 7%-8% of the total. The dramatic desktop decrease is in the Windows segment, dropping from about 87% of all accesses in 2010 to just 38% in 2012.

Another side note is how, even in the much larger 2012 mobile pie, Blackberry, Nokia, and Windows Phone, which may have actually grown in terms of raw numbers over this period, are still so visually insignificant that they don’t even get a label in the chart.

Far beyond the real Android story, Google has to be worried even more about the decline in the desktop pie, given that according to their own SEC filings, 96% of their revenue comes from web browser clicks – and people aren’t clicking those ads on their mobile devices. Google’s entire revenue model falls apart on mobile and so far, they’ve had no answer for that. Perhaps this is one reason they are shifting gears so much toward Google+ which seems to me to be chasing a 2002 dream.

I’ll stand by this dataset as a good representation of the net at large, although it is slanted toward the English speaking net. This is the aggregate of a number of popular and general sites. If you look at one focused niche site, it might vary a bit from the above, depending on how narrow the site is, but if you look at enough varied sites, I’m certain you’ll find something that looks a lot like the above.

The take-away for me is that not only are we headed into a mobile future, but we are headed, for better or worse, into an Apple future, and we better get used to it. If you take the Mac and iOS combined, Apple now owns 45% of the surfing experience, already surpassing Microsoft Windows at 38% – and it’s only getting worse for Windows, as iPad sales continue to steamroll PCs. This “Android Dominance” meme is utter fiction and wishful thinking. Windows Phone? Get real. Unless you’re fine playing in a niche space, if you’re building a product or service and it isn’t designed with mobile first, it’s time to re-think it – throw out your plans and start over. I’m dead serious. What’s more, if it doesn’t thrive in an Apple-dominated mobile ecosystem, it’s also time to go back to the drawing board.

Meta: If you use these graphics, please give credit.

The two features are interlinked, in what appears to be an attempt to make Facebook “friend lists” be more like Google+ “circles”.

New Sharing Options

This change started to roll out a few weeks ago and now appears to be  site wide, applying to all accounts.  The status box used to update your status got a few new controls and widgets.

New facebook status box

First, on the left are two new options. The “who are you with” button lets you tag people in your status update. The second widget adds location to the status. Ok, fine.

But the biggest change is the drop down on the right, next to the “Post” button. This lets you set who the status update goes to (sort of). The normal option (the way Facebook has always worked) would be the “Friends” choice, meaning the status update is seen by your friends only. If you specify “Public” your status is visible to anyone, basically making Facebook more like Twitter, where if you want to, you can publish your status updates for anyone to see. Bringing us to another new feature (described further below) where people that are not your friends, can “subscribe” to your public updates, again, more or less the way Twitter works. I think by default, Facebook has made the new default “Public,” so if you don’t change that, your status updates will be visible to everyone.

In addition to the “Public” and “Friends” options, you can now specify that an update should only be sent to friends on a specific list, one of your old “friend lists” (if you ever used that feature) or one of the new “automatic” lists that Facebook calls “Smart Lists,” which are managed by Facebook automatically for you based on profile information – another case of Facebook telling us “trust us, we know what you want.” Time will tell whether people find these automatic lists useful and trustworthy.

Finally, there is another special list called “Restricted” which is for friends that aren’t really friends This is where you put friends when you don’t want them to see your status updates. Friends on this special “Restricted” list will only see your “Public” updates (but I assume they still have access to your photos etc.)

Managing Friend Lists

The other significant change is in managing friends and friend lists. There are new options when you visit someone’s profile:

The new “Friends” widget shown above makes it easier to manage the lists a given friend is on. Every time you visit their profile, you can check or change what lists they are on. For anyone that suffered through the old cumbersome way of managing lists this is much easier than before, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.

There’s also the new “Subscribed” button, which allows you to subscribe to a person’s “Public” updates, so that any status updates they mark as “Public” will show up on your page, even if they are not your friend. This is clearly a case where Facebook wants to be like Twitter.

Why This A Potential FAIL

These new changes are mostly being heralded around the net and in the media as a brilliant move by Facebook. Technically, for being obviously bolted-on, I have to admit they are not that terrible, in terms of the implementation. But here’s where I wonder if Facebook might be shooting themselves in the foot here, and actually helping Google+ (especially) and Twitter (to a lesser degree) which is probably not their intent.

Twitter is essentially still a mainstream failure, with only 8% of online Americans using it. It’s clear that one big reason is Twitter’s complexity and the inability of Twitter to explain what it does and how to use it to mainstream users. It’s too early to tell whether Google+ will reach deep into the mainstream the way Facebook has. One of the points I raised about Google+ is the complexity and that it is too confusing to mainstream users:

Google+ is too complicated and too geek-oriented. When people share something with Google+, they are going to constantly find themselves asking “who is that going to?”  Twitter suffers from being too confusing to people too. But if Twitter is too complicated, Google+ is going to be like a third-semester Calculus class for many people. Only a tiny fraction of Twitter users ever figure out how to effectively manage notifications or “who sees what” on Twitter. Google+ hasn’t made it any easier. If people are overwhelmed and confused with the Twitter options, their brains are going to explode with Google+.

With Facebook now essentially copying the Google+ “circles” model, they have now introduced the same kind of complexity into Facebook that hinders their competitors, effectively removing a major differentiator of Facebook: being easy to understand for mainstream users.

Facebook has just done Google a huge favor.

In essence, by force feeding this change to  its 750 million users, Facebook will be doing something Google themselves may have spent years doing: teaching them how Google+ works. Facebook users have no choice but to accept these new features, and struggle to learn them, which will make all Facebook users more comfortable with the “circles” model, and that level of complexity, ultimately making it that much less painful to switch to Google+.

Before this, if a Facebook user went to Google+, they had to figure out how “circles” and selective sharing work using Google+ itself.  Google+ would be their first exposure to this mode of operating. They would have no mental model for it and no prior experience with the ideas of it. Now, a Facebook user will have a direct analog from their Facebook experience – as soon as they hit Google+ they will already have an idea how ”circles” and selective sharing work, removing a huge switching barrier.

Likewise, with the new “Public” and “Subscribe” features, Facebook is teaching those 750 million users how Twitter works too, something Twitter themselves has been largely unable to do. However, I think in this case, Twitter is the loser and Facebook the winner (more on that in a separate post).

But Google+, on the other hand, just got handed an enormously valuable gift by Facebook.

Recently, Google announced shocking new pricing for appengine that has its users reeling. In short, the new pricing means:

• “Free” quotas have been drastically reduced
• Pricing of paid apps increased significantly
• SLA and operational support available for a premium

Google has provided a tool so customers can compare their current bills versus expected billis under the new pricing and customers report anywhere from 3x to 30x price increases, leaving many scrambling for alternatives.

Two of the most common complaints from customers are lack of notice and the uncertainty of the pricing (lack of control over costs).

In terms of cost control, the only way to know how much your costs are, is to ask Google, after you have already incurred those costs (and built and deployed your app). It’s impossible to map users or usage directly to cost. Google’s pricing scheme is as inscrutible as the worst telephone company billing.

The pricing was originally planned to take effect in September, which only gave customers a few weeks to react. Google has provided optimization guidelines for customers to try to reduce their costs, but given the short notice, customers simply do not have time to make major changes to their apps. Companies already had their development resources planned out. They aren’t sitting around waiting for Google to throw a wrench at them. And it’s not clear how much further optimization will really save you anyway since a lot of apps have already received cost-cutting optimizations.

To me, I think this goes a long way to confirm some of my concerns about Google as a cloud platform vendor and as an enterprise vendor in general. A lot of people think anything Google touches is golden (especially Google, just ask them), but I think this shows how they still just don’t get it when it comes to providing commercial grade services. I have asked before, regarding many Google products, whether Google was serious this time. This is the risk to me of doing any business with Google. All these other non-search products are simply “tests” for them. A few billion here, a few billion there, throw it out and see what sticks. The problem is, if you latch on to one of these products and then it becomes critical to your business, you just never know when Google might, on a whim, go in a different direction, hanging you out to dry.

And that appears to be how a lot of customers feel about this move by Google, such as expressed in this post on the mailing list:

App Engine is finished, here’s why

What has always been the biggest concern about App Engine? Lock-in. You’re at the mercy of Google. Sure there’s TyphoonAE etc… but really those are not alternatives.

What does Google go ahead and do? They do exactly what their critics said they would do and what us GAE adopters hoped like hell they would never do, screw us over.

App Engine is finished not because we’re all going to move off to EC2, but because people who are considering using App Engine will see exactly what has gone on here with the pricing, think about the lock-in argument against GAE, and decide not to use GAE. There will be a drop off in new apps, and eventually Google is going to see GAE isn’t really panning out and pull the 3 year plug.

Thankfully, I don’t operate any services on GAE with high costs, but even as it is, I feel ripped-off for my investment in AppEngine. I do run some services on it, some of which I would rather not have to shut down, so I might have to move those elsewhere. And there are some apps I will simply shut down because they are not worth the trouble to port elsewhere. Some of those apps were potentially interesting and gathering users – in that sense, I’m glad this move by Google is happening now, before these apps got big enough to have to now decide what to do with them.

What’s worse for me though, is simply all the time invested in learning AppEngine. What a waste of time that appears to have been. As one developer says:

The biggest complaint is that when my friends and peers objected to App Engine, its strange requirements and its potential lock in, they were right and I am a fucking naive idiot. And I really don’t like to be proven a naive idiot. I put my faith in Google’s engineers and they have utterly destroyed my credibility. THIS more than anything is the cost to me.

Google’s celebrated algorithms may power the Web’s most popular search engine, but they have not yet been programmed to answer a call when a customer has a problem. …

Some analysts said that Google appeared to have misjudged the service demands that come with being in the business of selling sophisticated gadgets.

Time will tell whether Google’s historic “we don’t provide support, we’re Google, we don’t have to” attitude is going to carry over from search to U.S. cell phone users.

What’s next? Will Apple will start adding secret hidden “blacklists” to Safari too so competitors cannot even develop web-based versions of their apps?

On the one hand, I tell myself Google’s ad business will be hurt badly because companies will be cutting back.

On the other hand, one could also argue that with layoffs, and more people having to resort to working from home etc. Google offers the only low barrier to entry option, so Google advertising will increase like never before.

What do you think?