One Finite Planet

One Finite Planet

the mobile pressure is on apple and samsung, and the importance of Tizen

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The mobile space is dominated by two brands: Apple and Samsung.

Each has reached such a large market that continuing to increase market share basically requires the other company to falter.

Both have ‘hit the wall’ in terms of market share in the mobile space, with further grown thin market share a real challenge.

For Apple the challenge is growth.  In the last few years, Apple stock has more than doubled in value rougly every 3 years. Even if Samsung stop selling phones the Samsung market share was taken over entirely by Apple, this would on allow for one more doubling.  Instead, Apple needs to find new markets.  If Apple finds a new market every three years to fuel growth, then that new market has to be twice as large as the previous new market. The alternative to new markets or growing market share is to stop growing and that brings its own pain. I will soon do another post specifically on the growth challenges for Apple, but surfice for now that reaching a market share that is difficult to significantly increase is a problem for Apple.

So now to Samsung!

Samsung is a very different company and despite sharing the dominance in mobile devices, Samsung is in a very different position.

As a company, Samsung is far more diverse than Apple, and mobile devices are a far smaller percentage of revenue.  Despite this greater diversity, and Samsung actually selling more devices than Apple, the market cap of Samsung is far smaller than that of Apple and there is not the same historic rate of growth to maintain.

As a mobile device company, the big difference is that unlike Apple, Samsung does not have its own ‘ecosystem’ to generate additional profits from those mobile devices.  Instead, Samsung faces competion from other device manufactures competing within the same ecosystem.  Within the Android market, Samsung holds a level of market share impossible to significantly increase, and extremely difficult to maintain. Within Android there is no great barrier to consumers switching brands and running an idenitcal platform reduces the ability for product differentiation placing Samsung at the risk of simply losing market share as fashions change.

The answer for Samsung is Tizen.

Tizen can provide Samsung with an ecosystem that Samsung can control and earn ecosystem profits instead of letting google earn profits on all those Samsung devices. Bringing ecosystems to citical mass is extremely challenging and changing ecosystems risks alientating consumers.  Samsnug has sucessfully moved its ‘wearable’ devices from an intitial launch on Android across to Tizen but has only had false starts on phones so far.

But owning an ecosystem is realistically Samsungs only way to keep mobile device revenues where they are.  A wearables ecosystem could be sufficient if over time wearables become more significant than phones, but I doubt it.  Expect Samsung to keep moving with Tizen, or lose mobile device revenues.

Table of Contents

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RCS – The SMS successor and blue bubbles vs green culture war.

The world and usage of SMS has moved on since the introduction in 1992, and the system lacks many features now seen as essential, including even the ability to see if a message has been received.

Apple has its own proprietary “iMessage” SMS/MMS successor for communication between iPhones within the Apple walled garden and the bubble wars, Facebook has its own messages system and has “What’s App”, but is there room for a true SMS successor that is not a walled garden fully controlled by one technology company to create division into “tribes”, and instead is able to connect all devices just like the original SMS system?

RCS is simple to enable and is the best messaging solution for Samsung and other Android phones and to end culture wars and walled gardens.

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A different perspective: Humans maybe the greatest threat to life on Earth but also the only hope.

The title ‘one finite planet’ can be mistaken to be yet another proclamation of how we live on this amazing planet which could even be unique, and we humans are foolishly placing it all at risk. Boring.

No. Instead, the perspective is we are living on a planet that is naturally hostile to humans, where nature dictates only a limited total amount of life, can only exist for a limited time, and that time is almost at an end. When seen from this perspective, even the environment mission changes from just not interfering, to the more complex task of tackling the challenge of overcoming nature, while yes, quite importantly, not bringing life to an early end in the process.

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Surprise, Shortest day ever recorded: Not just the solstice, but climate change?

This page is more under the heading of ‘fun facts’.

The first ‘fun fact’ is that while everyone knows how the length of daytime and nigh time vary throughout the year, it may come as a surprise to realise the length of the entire day, also varies. Partly because, second fun fact, the a day is a longer than one rotation of the Earth, which lead to the third fun fact: we just had the shortest total day ever recorded.

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WordPress.com to the Next Level: Plugins, Elementor, CoBlocks?

Something completely different. A discussion on how this site is hosted: on wordpress.com.

Anyone who has started a “blog” or other site on wordpress.com, may get to wonder, what are the options for upgrading the website? What is the value of the free, personal or premium plans and beyond? What real world benefits are there, and, alternatively, what would you lose and/or gain from moving away from wordpress.com. This is a page discussing being in that situation. If you are not considering having a website, it may be of little interest.

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Images, Making Animated GIFs & Solving colour problems.

This is part of series of pages I will be adding on things I have learnt as part of building this website, and I will soon try and enable following by topic (when I get this page working), so people can separately select notification on building websites and/or population or other issues, without being notified of things outside their interest. Standby for that update.

Meanwhile this page provides general help on making an animated GIF for a series of images, specific help on a challenge with animated GIFs, and a list of sites with free images as a resource for those building images.

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Hydrogen Future or Fool’s Gold & Scams: “Where does the hydrogen come from?”

The race to stop CO2, has led to many ‘scam‘ projects involving hydrogen, but it is not always clear who is being scammed: the public, or the proponents of hydrogen projects. What is the attraction behind the obsession with hydrogen? This is a look at the motives, the myths and the facts around hydrogen projects.

Spoiler: There are some valid roles for hydrogen, but hydrogen has no remaining role as an energy source, and even any potential role as an energy carrier is highly questionable.

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