Current status of the “Browser Wars”

Current status of the “Browser Wars”:

In this report we will examine the current status of what is often referred to as the “Browser Wars.” How popular are the various web browsers around the world right now? As you’ll see, there are significant regional differences in web browser usage.
We’ve done this on two levels. First, a quick overview, and below that we’ve gone into more detail about the current web browser usage in each world region, as well as the overall usage in the world. Plenty of charts, we promise!
The data is very recent, reflecting web usage the first 3 weeks of April (courtesy of StatCounter, based on visits to 3+ million websites). So this is very much the status right now.

Overview

The days when IE completely dominated the browser landscape are long gone. Microsoft’s browser still has a big chunk of the market, but much less so in some regions than others. It has lost its lead in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America, but remains dominant in North America and Oceania (consisting primarily of Australia).

As you can see by this map, the “big three” are no doubt IE, Firefox and Chrome. Opera and Safari are both out of the top three in all world regions.
An interesting observation is that IE, Chrome and Firefox each top two regions.
One could also argue that open source has won the browser wars. Firefox and Chrome together make up a majority part in every region.
Now, let’s dig into this data in more detail…

Web browser usage in North America

North America is the only region where IE usage really dominates by a wide margin. It’s still well below the 50-percent line, though. This is also one of the strongest markets for Apple’s Safari, the other being Oceania.

Web browser usage in South America

South America loves Google. Not only is Brazil the main stronghold for Google’s first social network, Orkut, but overall browser usage in the region strongly favors Google’s browser. Chrome became the most common browser in South America back in October last year. The most recent version of Chrome is now used 3x as much as the second-most-used browser version, IE 8.

Web browser usage in Europe

Europe is the most even browser battlefield, with usage being almost equal between IE, Chrome and Firefox. Chrome and IE usage is neck and neck, and Firefox only leads by a thin margin.

Web browser usage in Africa

This is clearly a continent that has embraced Mozilla’s web browser more than any other part of the world. That said, if you look at individual browser versions, Chrome’s latest is in the lead (as it is everywhere but North America).

Web browser usage in Asia

IE only lost the crown in Asia very recently, as we reported a few weeks ago. Now Chrome is in the lead, and everything points to this lead increasing.

Web browser usage in Oceania / Australia

Oceania is the second world region where IE still is in the lead, but it’s not as dominant here as it is in North America. This is Safari’s strongest market, partly thanks to the iPad (see “A few additional observations” for more on that).

Web browser usage worldwide

If you’ve read this far, we suspect you’re also curious about the overall worldwide status. So here it is.

A few additional observations

• Google has been very successful with keeping Chrome users up to date (thanks to automated, silent updates). This is a contributing factor to the latest official version of Chrome being the most widely used browser version in the world. This is great because it minimizes fragmentation, at least of the Chrome browser. Microsoft’s IE suffers from the exact opposite approach, showing a lot of fragmentation between its versions.
• Also of note is that Safari for iPad has managed to cram itself into several of the top 10 lists of individual browser versions. (StatCounter doesn’t separate out tablet browsers from its statistics, although it does separate out mobile browsers and small-screen devices.) Apple’s tablet is not only selling in large quantities, people are most definitely using it. Based on this, the markets where the iPad has had the most impact would be Oceania, North America and Europe, in that order. Australians sure seem to love their iPads.
• You may tear up reading this, but IE 6 is still around. On the plus side, it’s only in two of the top 10 lists, the one for Africa, where it came in last place, and the one for Asia, where it came in 7th place. (Correction: We originally overlooked Asia here, as a commenter pointed out.)

Conclusion

The glory days of IE may be over, and its market share may be diminishing by the day, but it’s still not something web designers can ignore. At least IE 6 is getting pretty rare these days.
How the lay of the land will look like a year from now is anyone’s guess, but judging by the current trends IE will continue to lose market share, and Chrome will gain significantly. Chrome is actually well on its way to becoming the most widely used web browser in the world. The projection for Firefox is less clear, but historically some of Chrome’s gains have come at its expense, so the outlook isn’t great for Mozilla’s browser unless they do something drastic to turn the trend.
We hope you enjoyed this “status update” of browser usage across the world. How is your favorite browser doing?
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Unforgiven: The consequences of profit failure in mobile phones:

In June of last year I wrote a post titled “Does the phone market forgive failure?” It was written on the eve of Nokia’s Q2 2011 report highlighting the historic consequences of a dip into negative operating margins for a phone vendor.
I listed 13 phone vendors who were either merged, liquidated or acquired. There are no examples of vendors who recovered from a position of loss making.
I was prompted to follow-up by a note Charter Equity Research analyst Edward Snyder wrote illustrating the effect of negative operating margins on phone vendors. I took his illustration and expanded it with additional data.

Since my post in June last year Sony Ericsson and Motorola were acquired making the victims list total 14 companies, with Nokia, LG and RIM having joined the “endangered species list”. If the pattern repeats, then RIM and Nokia are in early phases of what promises to be an extended period of pain followed by an exit.
What the analysis does not answer is when a vendor loses its independence after beginning loss making. Motorola took 20 quarters; Sony Ericsson 14, Ericsson 8 and Siemens only 7. We cannot tell if or when LG, which is still operating after 8 and Nokia, which is now in its fourth and RIM, now in its second quarter post-loss, will lose independence.
The rumors swirling around RIM and LG are centered around exits and some suggest Nokia will follow. Many also argue that these companies will recover. The conditions they each face are different in details but broadly they are the same. Earlier last decade the exits were prompted by loss of brand value and subsequent loss of distribution. This decade disruption brought upon by mobile computing brings with it new business models centered on ecosystems and value captured through software and services.
Until and unless these endangered companies solve the dilemma of having the wrong business model at the wrong time, the chances are that they will not be forgiven for market failure.

World Internet population has doubled in the last 5 years

World Internet population has doubled in the last 5 years: World Internet population has doubled in the last 5 years:



This year the number of Internet users worldwide reached 2.27 billion, almost exactly twice what it was in 5 years ago, 1.15 billion. We all know the Internet is big, but this kind of growth really puts things into perspective.

The Internet population has been swelling rapidly since the arrival of the World Wide Web (which rests firmly on top of the foundation provided by the Internet). It’s human nature to get used to changes, so most of us have a tendency to forget how rapidly the world has changed, and keeps changing.

And as the Internet population grows, so does the potential size of online services. One example of this extreme evolution is Facebook. Last year we noted that Facebook now has more users than the entire Internet had back in 2004, the year the social network was founded.

But now, let’s see what has happened with the Internet population in the last five years as it doubled. Where did the changes come from, and what observations can we make?

A closer look at the Internet population growth

Yes, that big world map at the start of this article tells much of the story, but if you like digging into the details you might want to read on.

Since 2007, the global Internet population has grown by 1.1 billion. Where did those new Internet users come from? Let’s have a look:



One of the big take-aways from this chart is that Asia not only has the largest Internet population, but that it is also growing the fastest by quite some margin.

Here is how the number of Internet users has changed per world region in the past 5 years:

• Africa has gone from 34 million to 140 million, a 317% increase.
• Asia has gone from 418 million to over 1 billion, a 143% increase.
• Europe has gone from 322 million to 501 million, a 56% increase.
• The Middle East has gone from 20 to 77 million, a 294% increase.
• North America has gone from 233 to 273 million, a 17% increase.
• Latin America (South & Central America) has gone from 110 to 236 million, a 114% increase.
• Oceania (including Australia) has gone from 19 to 24 million, a 27% increase.

A few additional observations

• Asia’s Internet population is now almost as large as the entire Internet population was 5 years ago.
• Looking at just relative growth, Africa and the Middle East have increased the most, quadrupling the number of Internet users in each region.
• 2012 heralded two nicely even milestones: Europe passing 500 million Internet users, and Asia passing 1 billion.
• Europe is now twice as large as the United States in terms of Internet population.

A Moore’s Law for Internet user numbers?

After reading this article, you might ask yourself if the Internet population doubles every 5 years? Kind of a Moore’s Law for the Internet?

There’s actually a kind of Moore’s Law for the Internet which states that the Internet doubles in size every 5 years (there’s that interval again!), but it refers to infrastructure and not people. This was reported back in 2009, a discovery made by Chinese researchers.

To see if something similar applies to Internet user numbers, we’ve examined Internet population changes from the past decade, and it does seem to indicate that we are following this pattern, at least roughly. For example, the jump from 2002 to 2007 was also roughly a doubling of the number of Internet users.

That said, this is not really a law that scales. We’re limited by the actual world population, which isn’t growing at the pace necessary to maintain such a trend in the long run. If we assume it works until every man, woman and child on the planet has Internet access, we would reach the limit before the end of this decade.

For now, though, it looks to be a rule of thumb we can use when trying to make future estimates, as long as those estimates aren’t too far into the future. After all, only one third of the world’s population has access to the Internet today.

Data source: Internet user numbers from Internet World Stats, with some help from the good old Internet Archive to get old stats.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

World Internet population has doubled in the last 5 years

World Internet population has doubled in the last 5 years:

This year the number of Internet users worldwide reached 2.27 billion, almost exactly twice what it was in 5 years ago, 1.15 billion. We all know the Internet is big, but this kind of growth really puts things into perspective.
The Internet population has been swelling rapidly since the arrival of the World Wide Web (which rests firmly on top of the foundation provided by the Internet). It’s human nature to get used to changes, so most of us have a tendency to forget how rapidly the world has changed, and keeps changing.
And as the Internet population grows, so does the potential size of online services. One example of this extreme evolution is Facebook. Last year we noted that Facebook now has more users than the entire Internet had back in 2004, the year the social network was founded.
But now, let’s see what has happened with the Internet population in the last five years as it doubled. Where did the changes come from, and what observations can we make?

A closer look at the Internet population growth

Yes, that big world map at the start of this article tells much of the story, but if you like digging into the details you might want to read on.
Since 2007, the global Internet population has grown by 1.1 billion. Where did those new Internet users come from? Let’s have a look:

One of the big take-aways from this chart is that Asia not only has the largest Internet population, but that it is also growing the fastest by quite some margin.
Here is how the number of Internet users has changed per world region in the past 5 years:

• Africa has gone from 34 million to 140 million, a 317% increase.
• Asia has gone from 418 million to over 1 billion, a 143% increase.
• Europe has gone from 322 million to 501 million, a 56% increase.
• The Middle East has gone from 20 to 77 million, a 294% increase.
• North America has gone from 233 to 273 million, a 17% increase.
• Latin America (South & Central America) has gone from 110 to 236 million, a 114% increase.
• Oceania (including Australia) has gone from 19 to 24 million, a 27% increase.

A few additional observations

• Asia’s Internet population is now almost as large as the entire Internet population was 5 years ago.
• Looking at just relative growth, Africa and the Middle East have increased the most, quadrupling the number of Internet users in each region.
• 2012 heralded two nicely even milestones: Europe passing 500 million Internet users, and Asia passing 1 billion.
• Europe is now twice as large as the United States in terms of Internet population.

A Moore’s Law for Internet user numbers?

After reading this article, you might ask yourself if the Internet population doubles every 5 years? Kind of a Moore’s Law for the Internet?
There’s actually a kind of Moore’s Law for the Internet which states that the Internet doubles in size every 5 years (there’s that interval again!), but it refers to infrastructure and not people. This was reported back in 2009, a discovery made by Chinese researchers.
To see if something similar applies to Internet user numbers, we’ve examined Internet population changes from the past decade, and it does seem to indicate that we are following this pattern, at least roughly. For example, the jump from 2002 to 2007 was also roughly a doubling of the number of Internet users.
That said, this is not really a law that scales. We’re limited by the actual world population, which isn’t growing at the pace necessary to maintain such a trend in the long run. If we assume it works until every man, woman and child on the planet has Internet access, we would reach the limit before the end of this decade.
For now, though, it looks to be a rule of thumb we can use when trying to make future estimates, as long as those estimates aren’t too far into the future. After all, only one third of the world’s population has access to the Internet today.
Data source: Internet user numbers from Internet World Stats, with some help from the good old Internet Archive to get old stats.
This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

Mobile Patents Landscape – An In-depth Quantitative Analysis

Mobile Patents Landscape – An In-depth Quantitative Analysis:
http://www.chetansharma.com/MobilePatentsLandscape.htm


Introduction
In April 2012, in its report on Intellectual Property, the US Patent Office (USPTO) concluded that the entire US economy relies on some form of IP, because virtually every industry either produces or uses it. The foreword of the report said,
“Innovation protected by IP rights is key to creating new jobs and growing exports. Innovation has a positive pervasive effect on the entire economy, and its benefits flow both upstream and downstream to every sector of the U.S. economy. Intellectual property is not just the final product of workers and companies—every job in some way, produces, supplies, consumes or relies on innovation, creativity, and commercial distinctiveness. Protecting our ideas and IP promotes innovative, open, and competitive markets, and helps ensure that the U.S. private sector remains America’s innovation engine.”
Intellectual property has been an integral part of the economic engine of the western world for many decades if not centuries. Over the past two decades, nations and corporations have competed on the creation, funding, execution, and protection of the new ideas. Increasingly, the role of mobile devices, networks, and applications has become an important component of the growth story worldwide.
To say that the mobile devices have become the remote control of our lives would be an understatement. Mobile phones stay attached to us almost 24 hours a day. From waking us up in the morning to keeping us connected and entertained, from speeding up a commerce transaction to being a trusted advisor; mobile is fundamentally changed how we as consumers behave and how societies and cultures evolve over time. As a result, there has been a big influx of investment and innovation over the last decade. This surge of activity has also translated into increased number of patent filings in the two major jurisdictions of US and Europe. Even the developing countries like China and India have seen a significant increase in patent activity in the country. In fact, in terms of filings, China’s share of the global patent grants has increased from 0.8% in 1996 to 15% in 2010 placing it third behind Japan and the US and well ahead of Korea and Europe.
According to the US Patent Office (USPTO), in 2011, the number of applications reached over 535,000 growing by almost 54% from a decade ago. Similarly, the number of patents granted grew 35% to 224,505 by the end of 2011. The numbers of foreign filings are now in the majority for both the applications filed as well as the patents granted. In Europe, similar trends were observed where the EPO (European Patent Office) patent grants increased by 46%.
The number of mobile related patents that were granted by the USPTO and the EPO increased significantly over the course of last decade. The US market saw a 390% increase while the European market saw a 173% increase in mobile related patent grants.
Another interesting fact is that as of Q1 2012, over 21% of the patents granted by the USPTO now are mobile related. This grew from around 2% in 1991 and 5% in 2011. In Europe, roughly 9% of the patents granted are related to mobile.
Chetan Sharma Consulting analyzed almost 7 million patents granted by the USPTO and EPO over the last two decades to understand how mobile has become a key enabler for all technology companies. Furthermore, we looked at patent granted to the top 65 technology companies who are active in the mobile space to understand their relative strengths and weaknesses in the mobile patent landscape. In a first of its kind study, the paper presents and discusses these findings in more detail.
Read the full paper
Your feedback is always welcome.
Chetan Sharma
We will be keeping a close eye on the trends in the wireless data sector in our blog, twitter feeds, future research reports, and articles. The next US Wireless Data Market update will be released in May 2012. The next Global Wireless Data Market update will be issued in Apr 2012.
Disclaimer: Some of the companies mentioned in this paper are our clients.

When will smartphones reach saturation in the US?

When will smartphones reach saturation in the US?:
Nielsen has already noted that more than half of US consumers have smartphones. comScore’s data seems to point to that threshold being crossed sometime this year.
If that point is crossed then it would mark the smartphone as one of the most rapidly adopted consumer technologies of all time. I plotted the time it took for a set of technologies to reach 50% penetration of US households.

I also showed the time it took for some of the technologies to reach 80% penetration.
The obvious question is how long will it take for smartphones to reach saturation in the US. Saturation level would be above 80% for individuals but closer to 100% for households. A conservative estimate would be another seven years. An aggressive estimate would be five years. That implies that between 2017 and 2019 smartphones will be the only mobile phones Americans will use. That would be equivalent to a user population of about 300 million.
Note that some like Internet and home computers have not reached 80% penetration in the US.[1] [2] When or whether smartphones will overtake computer penetration in the US is an open question. I believe that, like cellphones have in other markets, smart devices will overtake computer consumption and thus penetration and even bandwidth consumption.
There are significant technical and marketing challenges for reaching the “second half” of the market, but, as in all the other technologies listed above the incentives are in place to overcome these challenges. What’s most remarkable about smartphones is the speed with which obstacles are overcome. For such a complex and inter-dependent technology, the speed of adoption and value creation is unprecedented.
The value network creation rate is also staggering. The App Industry went from inception to billion dollar valuations in a matter of three years. Entirely new business models and experiences are being created almost daily. What used to be a glacial process of innovation diffusion can now be observed in near real-time.
—
Notes:

1. The question of when smartphones began penetrating the US is somewhat debatable. I contend it was either 2004 or 2005 when the BlackBerry and Treo brands began to be widely available. Although there were smartphones in production as early as 2001 (or even 1998 if we choose to include the GeOS based Nokia Communicator) their availability to US consumers was very limited.
2. Source for consumption data: New York Times.

Half of US iPhones are repeat purchases

Half of US iPhones are repeat purchases:

Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley writes in a note to clients today. “In fact, we believe iPhones are outselling all other smartphones combined at Sprint and AT&T and selling at roughly equal volume to all Android smartphones at Verizon.”

via iPhone Tops Sales Charts at Each of Its U.S. Carriers – John Paczkowski – Mobile – AllThingsD.
That’s useful data. Mainly because we can use it in combination with comScore data that tracks a different market measure. comScore’s MobiLens service tracks US mobile installed base. By measuring the difference between their stats one month to the next, one can measure the gain in a particular platform.

Comparing that gain with the sell-through rate in the same period can yield a figure for the number of units sold as upgrades vs. those sold to new users.
The latest comScore data (period ending February) shows that Android added 2.87 million users to its base while iPhone added 1.52 million. If we assume that Android sold a minimal number of replacements (due to the limited time in use of bulk of units) and round up to 3 million for February, and if we assume that Apple sells as many iPhones as Android (which is what Walkley suggests) then we can conclude that in the US roughly half the iPhones are bought as replacements for existing iPhones.
Extrapolating this to global markets may be risky but already we can begin to form a picture of how the iPhone franchise is becoming an annuity-based business.
Apple likes to point out that “half of Mac buyers are first time buyers.” In the case of the iPhone perhaps they could also say “half of iPhone buyers are repeat customers.” At this stage in the platform, that’s a powerful statement. If the repeat customer rate is high then it suggests strong loyalty but it also may suggest poor competitive position vs. non-consumption or alternate platforms. If the repeat customer rate is very low it may suggest competition vs. non-consumption but it may also suggest low loyalty. It all depends on the overall growth in the market and size of installed base.
The following chart shows the overall market growth and the position of the various platforms within that growth.

Note the time scale is slightly more than two years. This suggests that the vast bulk of Android units in use (grey area) consists of first use units. New purchases are going to first time buyers. In contrast, the shrinking RIM total implies extremely low sales as the age of the base is far older than the time scale. iPhone base is both growing and being upgraded.
As we reach 50% penetration of smartphones, platform churn will become a significant component of market performance. The loyalty and “stickiness” of Android will begin to be tested. Current surveys show reasonably good satisfaction ratings for Android phones (around 60%) while iPhone’s are even higher. But let’s keep in mind that RIM’s satisfaction and the loyalty of their customers was exceptionally high a few years ago. The rate of evaporation of goodwill toward the brand is breathtaking.
The longer term test of mobile platform performance will be in the recurring purchase rates. Loyalty must be earned and preserved. I.e. “You come for the product, you stay for the ecosystem.”
So far, the iPhone seems to be getting a passing grade while Android has yet to face the test.

Smartphones Account for Half of all Mobile Phones, Dominate New Phone Purchases in the US

Smartphones Account for Half of all Mobile Phones, Dominate New Phone Purchases in the US:
Almost half (49.7%) of U.S. mobile subscribers now own smartphones, as of February 2012. According to Nielsen, this marks an increase of 38 percent over last year; in February 2011, only 36 percent of mobile subscribers owned smartphones.  This growth is driven by increasing smartphone adoption, as more than two-thirds of those who acquired a new mobile device in the last three months chose a smartphone over a feature phone.

Overall, Android continues to lead the smartphone market in the U.S., with 48 percent of smartphone owners saying they owned an Android OS device. Nearly a third (32.1%) of smartphone users have an Apple iPhone, and Blackberry owners represented another 11.6 percent of the smartphone market. Among recent acquirers who got their smartphone within the last three months, 48 percent of those surveyed in February said they chose an Android and 43 percent bought an iPhone.

RIM to give up

RIM to give up:

RIM’s CEO, Thorsten Heins was quoted as saying, “We plan to refocus on the enterprise business and capitalize on our leading position in this segment. We believe that BlackBerry cannot succeed if we tried to be everybody’s darling and all things to all people. Therefore, we plan to build on our strength.”

via RIM to give up most consumer markets | Ubergizmo.
RIM’s latest quarterly results show a continuation of the decline in sales that began in Q1 2011.

Here are the highlights:

• Smartphone units declined 26% y/y and 21% sequentially. Over a four year period the company still shows a positive growth of 20% compounded, though that is far below industry average
• The smartphone revenues were down 29% y/y and 23% sequentially.
• Including service revenues, the revenue per smartphone dropped to $346, a drop of 4%.
• I estimate the phone operating margin to be less than 5%. The company swung to a net negative operating margin due to write-downs of tablet inventory but the phone business managed to break even.
• Operating income from phone operations dropped to the lowest level in five years.
• The company is still generating cash flow and has a cash reserve of over $2 billion.

Seen in isolation, the company is clearly struggling but does not seem to be on its last legs. But no company should be seen in isolation. As part of a competitive market, the company is in far worse shape. The following chart shows the AMP index which measures relative performance through a blend of market shares.

This chart does not include the latest quarterly data but if it did it would be sure to show a continuing decline. The AMP index actually shows RIM peaking in Q1 2009, well before the volumes peaked.
It’s within this context that we need to evaluate the new CEO’s strategic shift. In the quote above we have the first significant strategic departure and split from the past. Should it inspire hope or despair?
The idea of focus has huge benefits. Focus and the art of saying no are keys to greatness. However, you only succeed if you focus on the right thing. “Enterprise” is not the right thing. It’s not a valid target. Enterprise support is a feature, not a product. I don’t mean that as opinion, but as a point of fact. Focus on a set of customers whose only characteristic is a job description is missing the whole point of focus.
Focus needs to be positioned on a job a brand needs to be hired to do. The idea should be to solve an open problem which is either too complex or too uneconomical for anyone else to solve. Corporate buyers have problems to solve but the BlackBerry no longer offers unique or defensible solutions. Furthermore, corporate buyers are themselves being dis-intermediated from the computing purchase decision. Sometimes this process is called “consumerization” but it is more plainly explained as “commoditization”. The selection of tools for workers by a group that claims to understand their needs better than they do is an archaic concept.
This was true even in 2005 when RIM began targeting consumers. It was then that they saw the writing on the wall–that their enterprise business was being commoditized. All of RIM’s growth since has been in consumer segments. By abandoning that trajectory RIM is effectively giving up on growth. And giving up on growth is simply giving up.

Web Browser Market Share, March 2012 Update

Web Browser Market Share, March 2012 Update:

Mobile Manufacturer Market Share, March 2012 Update

Mobile Manufacturer Market Share, March 2012 Update:

Operating System Market Share, March 2012 Update

Operating System Market Share, March 2012 Update:

Weighing the share of value created

Weighing the share of value created:
Philip Elmer-Dewitt published a table from Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster which has some interesting details. Munster has taken a four year “tech sector” view of value creation (and destruction) and tried to see if there is a bound on the value Apple can continue to capture. This “share of value” is one of many approaches to bounding an opportunity. You could consider “share of wallet” by measuring disposable income, or “share of eyeballs” by measuring screen time available or even “share of GDP”.
The attractive part of the share of value of industry is that we have an implicit way to see winners and losers, or the transfer of wealth from one group to another. I charted the data published as follows:

Seen in this context, Apple generated nearly as much value[1] as RIM, Nokia, Sony, Dell, HP and Microsoft destroyed. The rest of the sector generated $233 billion of value but if it were not for Apple, the tech sector would have declined by $168 billion.
As a result, Apple went from being 5.6% of the value of the sector to being nearly 17%. The argument goes that its share of value could still increase further even if the overall sector does not. At 30% of current total value, Apple would be valued above $1 trillion.
My observation is that the conservation of value exhibited in this data is not the entire story. What is gained by Apple should be more than what is lost by others. The disruption under way has had victims but the net value created should be more than what they lost. The iPhone and iPad should be competing with non-consumption, bringing new value into the sector from other sectors or from non-productive capital. Perhaps they are and the losses by the cohort arrayed above are incidental, but there is likely to be a blend of competition and new market growth.
Does the analysis satisfy?
Perhaps. It’s one more perspective into the puzzle. Growth rates, market sizes, technology improvements, brand and satisfaction analysis as well as jobs to be done are all offering perspective views. I would say there is consistency in the data but they should all be weighed with vigilance.
—
Notes:

1. Market cap is the perceived net present value of all future cash flows discounted to the present for a publicly traded company and hence defines the value created by the firm. It’s measured by markets so there is room for error but it’s the best measure available and has historically been accurate over long periods.

The single-atom transistor is here – the amazing evolution of microprocessors (infographic)

The single-atom transistor is here – the amazing evolution of microprocessors (infographic): The single-atom transistor is here – the amazing evolution of microprocessors (infographic):



A team of researchers in Australia has managed to create a transistor that is the size of an atom. That’s the smallest transistor ever created. Considering that the single-atom transistor is only 0.1 nanometer in size, the possible applications are mind-boggling.

It will be quite some time before we see the single-atom transistor technology implemented in microprocessors that we use in computers and other devices. But this is such a thrilling development that we wanted to find out how it fits in with how microprocessors have evolved so far.

How small can a transistor be?

With the single-atom transistor now a reality, at least in research labs, we charted the evolution of microprocessor manufacturing. We think you will agree with us; it’s quite a dramatic development over just 41 years. And things get even wilder when we gaze into the future, comparing the microprocessor manufacturing processes of today and yesterday with what is waiting around the corner.

Moore’s law will hit the wall

Gordon Moore gave name to the law that has been dominating the microprocessor evolution over the last 42 years.

Moore himself declared in 2005 that the law named after him was dead, when he said: “In terms of size [of transistor] you can see that we’re approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it’ll be two or three generations before we get that far.”

That may just become reality possibly sooner than even Moore thought.

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