John Kirk for Techpinions: >Not only do the high priests of market share have it wrong, they have it exactly backwards. The company with the lower market share and the higher profits has all of the leverage. The goal is to INCREASE, not decrease, the ratio of profits to market share. Increasing market share at the cost of profits is a recipe for disaster, not a formula for success. >Apple may or may not do well in the future but right now, and contrary to popular belief, they are winning the smartphone wars and winning them handily. John’s analysis is correct, in my opinion, with regard to Android device manufacturers. However, he is missing the point of Android. In fact, he doesn’t mention Google even once (other than in a quote from ReadWrite). You need to consider all of the players before you can declare a winner of the game. Google created Android as a defensive measure. It needed to be sure that a single company, such as Apple, did not gain control of the entire mobile market. If that were to happen, the possibility of Google’s services being shut out of the market loomed. Clearly, Google’s doomsday scenario never happened and likely never will. In this way, Android has won, and has performed better than Google ever imagined. Android is a huge win for Google. It’s true that most Android device makers have little to no profit. But it’s Android’s large market share that is the winner for Google. The more Android devices being used, the more Google services with Google ads are being used. People often forget that Google and Apple are playing the same game with different goals in mind. Apple strives to maximize profitability in hardware sales. Google, on the other hand, is striving for maximum market share, providing the most users for its services. This is a rare, if not unique, war where both Apple and Google can win, and that seems to be very confusing to people.

In order to succeed, Google as to sell as many device it can so it can continue gathering data about its users. For Apple to succeed, they must build the best products they can and put them in as many hand it can at the best profit it can. Two different goals. Two different stories.

Market share of smartphone sold tells only one part of the story. I don’t know why this is so important for the press. If you want to know which platform performs better than you have to look a many more factors like ads revenues, how big is the developers community, etc.

With this latest comScore figures, we clearly see that Androïd as a platform is profiting Samsung and only Samsung. Google isn’t even making money out of Androïd. And don’t tell me that they do on search, they do it anyway on every platforms. Same for ads. And speaking of ads, these are so everywhere in our “free” digital world (thanks to Google, Facebook et al.) that their selling values is starting to decline. Think about it.

The coupling of Google’s Androïd with Samsung tells us one clear thing: the only real way to make real money in the smartphone business is to have an integrated stack, just like Apple with their iPhones and iOS. They sell a lot of them and they make a lot of money out of this. Same could apply to Microsoft with Windows 8 and … Well, they don’t do Smartphone. Yet.

parislemon:

Speaking of Google and iOS, another huge one today: Capture, a new app for YouTube that finally lets you — get this — record video from your phone and upload it to YouTube. No, the app hasn’t had this before.

Surprising that YouTube took so long to offer this. Another slap in the face of Apple’s too basic Camera and Photos apps.

Interesting point of view from Gruber about Google and Apple on the Maps story. So Apple didn’t want to help Google collect user information while using Maps. We can see now that Google’s Maps for iOS 6 clearly want you to sign in with your Google account to sync your search and the like. Yeah, right.

But now that iOS provides a system wide sign in to Twitter and Facebook, can we pretend that Apple doesn’t help them to collect information about us in order to better target ads? I doubt it. The difference between this and Google isn’t very big.

chartier:

And so it… continues. Google announced nearly two dozen new features for Google+ just before the holiday shutdown and didn’t breathe a word about iOS, though Matt added a mention at the bottom after I noted it on Twitter. This is not an accusation of Matt or TNW, but an observation of Google’s…

This is why I hate Google. They are as devil as they think Apple is.