I still love @MDB’s line that making predictions is hard, especially when it comes to the future.
I agree with much of what you have to say, Daryl, but I think some of the figures are illusory.
With HA’s and Android, when we’re talking about Android fragmentation, we’re talking WHOLE WORLD figures. I wonder what the Android picture looks like just for the well-off countries? And with HA’s, we’re probably talking mostly about the well-off countries, not the same distribution as for Android world-wide.
The other thing about fragmentation is people like me are contributing to the appearance of fragmentation but in actuality we’re still living mostly in the now and the future, not the past. I can count four Android “devices” that I own. And just like you, I don’t trash my older devices. I keep them around, turn them on to charge them, update them at least once every other month or so. So I’m contributing a Galaxy Nexus from 2011, a Nexus 7 tablet from 2012, and a “phone device” run under a Blue Stacks emulator on my PC from the vicinity of 2012 to 2013, all of which are running Android 5 or earlier. But I only really use my Galaxy Note 8, running Android Pie(v.9). So some fraction of the fragmentation may result from folks like me who still keep their old devices hanging around, and again, to see what’s going on relative to countries HA OEM’s are focused on, it would be great to restrict Android analysis to regions where HA’s have a relatively high penetration rate into the population.
Fragmentation does not keep you from being dominant in your sphere of influence. Look at the penetration in enterprise of Microsoft vs. Apple (and Google) currently. Several years ago something like 35% of the world’s Windows computers were still running Windows XP (from 2001, well before Android was around-but the figure has dropped way down since then). I think Google’s reach around the world and the economy of owning an Android phone vs. an Apple device gives it a combination that makes it tough for Apple as a world company in the long run.
Chromebooks are also something that’s helping the ascendancy of Google. Google, because of the inexpensiveness and reliability of Chromebooks, the ease of maintaining them and keeping them in sync for classroom operations is supposedly killing Apple (which used to be the darling of education) and Microsoft (new purchases in education are supposed to be something like 60% Chromebooks, 20% Microsoft, 20% Apple). Microsoft, because of the openess of Android, is leaning heavily in Google’s direction (the Your Phone app, etc., the switch to a Chromium-based browser, the supposed Chromebook competitor in Windows Lite coming soon) whereas Apple doesn’t welcome heavy deep tie-ins to iOS.
I think Google has a lot going for it that’s going to lead to “world domination.” (until HuaWei gets tired of the U.S. messing with it and comes out with an even better mobile OS that works with its even better 5G technology-just kidding here). Google essentially has the problem of the multi-armed bandit that I’m learning about in an online course. The bandit’s played a few slot machines in the casino and some of them have paid off well. It has limited resources. Does it just keep playing the ones that have been paying off better than others, hoping for even bigger hits (exploitation) or will it be trapped in a local minimum if it does so and would it be better to invest some resources looking for other slot machines that potentially pay off even better (exploration). The multi-armed bandit paradigm/paradox, which fuels itself on maximum likelihood estimates is supposedly something all big entities face, limited resources, lots of projects, some of which might already be paying off. Where do you put your money to get the biggest overall payoff down the road? As soon as Google gets its quantum computing up and running, it will have sufficient computing resources to figure it all out for its sprawling discombobulated mess of an empire (<<<just kidding! at least on the quantum computing being the answer to Google’s problems>>>). But maybe the essence of Google is it hasn’t mastered the multi-armed bandit paradigm and MLE?! It’s just blowing its money in the casino gambling away in haphazard fashion, turned on by the wrong slot machines?!
).I would never come to the world of HA-investigetion having my first HA (nera2, oticon), because i can just go to audi for changing setting, nothing else. That is about total dependence on clinic. I can say nothing bad about clinic, but prefer to have some control in my hands.