We passed 4 million lifetime visits to this blog over weekend - thank you to readers

These numbers are staggering to me. This is a geeky little blog about mobile, but after passing 3 million lifetime visits to this blog in July of last year, we have now passed 4 million cumulative, so the latest million came in less than 8 months. So the annual run-rate is already at 1.5 million visits per year, and the monthly rate is more than 100,000 of you visiting here monthly. Wow.

I know its mostly a loyal passionate readership, and the big interest and focus continues to be the smartphone races, especially Apple iPhone, Nokia, Microsoft, Windows, Android and Samsung fans and followers, with of course the other brands thrown in.

This blog was set up by Alan Moore and me to connect with readers of our books, in particular Communities Dominate Brands, the signature book for this blog, 8 years ago. I am so delighted to discover that people new to the book still find it exceptionally insightful and helpful - as the world's first business book on social media, after all, all the user-generated stuff and citizen journalism and all that. But obviously after Alan reduced his involvement in writing to this blog some years back, my focus has shifted ever more to my core competence, mobile, at the expense of social media topics.

I try to write broadly, and in mobile, to cover topics as wide as mobile money and SMS text messaging and m-education etc, but most of the hottest news the past three years has been - as I predicted - the heating war around smarpthones. When we started this blog, only 7 of the Global Fortune 500 companies were smarpthone makers. Today well over 20 of the biggest companies on the planet are fighting in this smartphone bloodbath - literally the most competitive global industry ever seen in human history. Smartphones turned near-bankruptcy Apple Computer into a 'mobile company' and the biggest profits of any company ever. Sony the biggest home electronics maker says mobile is 'front and center' of its future. Google the world's biggest internet company says the future of the internet is mobile as says Facebook the biggest social media company. Samsung the world's biggest tech company says mobile is central to its future, as says Intel the biggest chip maker and so said in the past Microsoft too, the biggest software company (not sure about the future now, with Bill Gates finding Microsoft's mobile strategy to have been a mistake). The BBC says all broadcast content will be on mobile, Electronic Arts says mobile is future of gaming, Warner Music says wireless is future of music and get this, Visa says mobile is the future of payments. Yes, money! Already 48% of Kenya's total GDP transits mobile phone based payments. Yes, 48% of the total Kenyan economy now goes through mobile.

I thought year 2010 would be the year of the Bloodbath (and it was bloody), then year 2011 was going to be Year 2, the Electric Boogaloo (And it was bloodier still). I thought we'd see the end of the big smartphone wars in its year three, Digital Jamboree in 2012, and was predicting last autumn that this topic would be boring by now, Spring 2013, as the battle was going to be mostly settled as this end of 2012 picture was forming and our big winners seemed clear.

Only now, to find that we have all these big brands getting into it at the OS level, with Mozilla Firefox, Samsung Tizen, LG-Palm, all vying to become the 'real' third ecosystem behind Google's Android and Apple's iPhone. Microsoft's Windows Phone will try to fight back, Blackberry's BB10 gives the Canadian business phone maker new life, and smaller players like Jolla's Sailfish and Ubuntu are also trying to climb into the race. And who knows, if the Nokia Board finally wake up and fire Elop, they would still own the rights to MeeGo, their 'next generation' OS they developed to replace Symbian, which powers some superb smartphones like the N9 and N950, and which had a broad manufacturer base to support it and could maybe be revived - even MeeGo powered laptops/netbooks had been launched such as the one by Fujitsu. Suddenly we have a lot more to monitor in this space. And I now am looking at this being the Bloodbath Year 4 - Smartphones Galore.

So I will continue blogging here, with my rambling long blogs (and until Elop is fired for incompetence, will of course rant from time to time begging him to be fired). I will monitor other developments in the mobile space and blog about those, and when my mood so hits me, look at other tech like say Augmented Reality. And on my occasional peculiarities, I will have coming in the near future also my review of Skyfall (I do want to let everyone who was interested have their chance to go see it, for my review here will be somewhat of a plot 'spoiler' so I don't want to ruin your 007 experience haha). I also have some cool pix coming at some point about a peculiar hobby I have relating to my alter-ego, Bond, James Bond. I will keep publishing industry stats here - many that you can't find anywhere else. And I will occasionally write just silly stuff that pops into my head. I am an unstoppable grumpy old man, nobody tells me to shut up haha, and this is my blog, my rules, my topics and my rants..

If you readers keep coming back and reading this blog, and keep leaving comments, I will keep writing more for you here. As always, this blog will never have ads (I get those offers ever week, I reject them of course) and I will not make you register and I won't harvest your email. This blog is not for sale, won't be for sale. This is only for us - you and me - to connect. I love my job, I get to live the life of the Digital Gypsy, the James Bond lifestyle (without quite the same level of the killing and explosions) and this blog is my digital home. Yes, I spend a lot of time on Twitter too, but this is where you find Tomi Ahonen raw and uncensorred what I think, what I really-really think..

Thank you for visiting this blog and please do come back. If you feel so inclined, from time to time, post your comment here, and if you want to get in touch with me, drop me an email to tomi at tomiahonen dot com. Four million visitors in eight years. I never ever EVER would have thought that possible. Thank you all. 

Comments

[timple]

Skyfall- here's my review - great until the scene where he is rescued from the island somewhere in the Hong Kong sea - then it gets ridiculous. Bond films should be a sequence of just about plausible (1:100) events in themselves (Bond falls off train into a canyon and survives, Bond claws his way into a carriage with an articulated digger into a railway carriage etc etc) which together add up to total implausibility - but the events themselves should never be totally implausible (Baddy suddenly "controls" all of London etc etc). The producers always end up being tempted into implausibility, when they can resist this temptation they end up with the great Bond films.

[tired]

Congratulations!

Your blog and the comments are a fount of information, controversial at times, but informative.
Keep up the good work.
Cheers.

[Stevan Gvozdenović]

Tomi I have sent you an e-mail so tell me what you think :)

[foo]

Hey, congratulations! :)

Now just a curiosity -- how many of the visitors spend less than 1 minute in the page?

I ask that because sometimes I open the blog just to see if there is something new; if there is nothing new, I immediately close it. I think the technical word for that is "bounce rate".

Anyway -- 4 million is a huge milestone!!! Keep up the great work!!!

[John Phamlore]

If I may humbly ask, can there be more coverage of manufacturing, hardware, and national industrial policy as far as it relates to the mobile sphere?

For example, the recently announced Firefox OS phones will apparently use Qualcomm chips. Had this site listened to my comments, longtime readers would have instantly been able to surmise that China Unicom would be one of the partners and China Mobile would not. (As I have been trying to argue, China's industrial policy simply will NOT permit Qualcomm to achieve hegemony this mobile generation.)

The most important technology related announcement in recent days may have been Intel's deal with Altera.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/26/intel_altera_fab_deal/

Observe despite Nokia's long dance with Intel, Nokia never was able to make a deal on using Intel foundries despite Nokia desperately needing a new partner after TI announced it was exiting the mobile contract fab business, way back in 2008. Well may that's because Intel has a policy of not allowing its foundries to be used by competitors and Nokia was about to become one because Intel was going to buy Infineon and go its own way developing its own baseband chip solution.

It's amazing what can be predicted by just analyzing who is making hardware. It does not appear to me that Jolla / Sailfish's use of ST-Ericsson chips will end well.

[dies felices]

Congratulations Tomi and thank you!

Please do keep writing.

[transformers]

disruption, tomi, disruption. youu are so smart on soome mobile concepts but so dense on others.

[TDC123]

@John Phamlore

Qualcomm recently announced that they designing a chip to work worldwide on all possible frequencies and modulation formats.

What is your take on that, they certainly seem to be aiming to become the Intel of the mobile-sphere simply because they have chip based hardware IP related to the radio communcations which makes it difficult for other chip providers, like NVIDIA (although they are essentilally ARM), to compete.

Who do you think can compete at the moment with Qualcomm ?

[Winter]

Congratulations Tomi.

The Smartphone bloodbath really is the most important thing happening now. In 50 years, our grand children will learn when the internet was created, and that everyone got a Smartphone to use it. Everything else, financial meltdown and euro crisis, will have been forgotten.

It is an odd experience to have seen the original Star Trek, and to realize that the famous SciFi flip-open "communicator" of the crew is soooo 2000. That the phone in my breast pocket has more computing power than the whole of Houston ground control during the first landing on the moon.

[John Phamlore]

@TDC123 What I have been trying to start is a discussion about what I think will be the real question about mobile and people's careers: What are people going to do about China?

Qualcomm in the United States and some other places in the developed world has achieved one of the greatest market victories, coming from a position in 2008 where many analysts thought their IP and thus the company would eventually disappear in importance to where they basically dictate what LTE baseband chips are used in the giant market of the United States. But I suspect what the Chinese think is a lot different than what is presented in mainstream Western media. I suspect the Chinese regard Qualcomm as the US version of Huawei, a company that has benefited from close connections to the military industrial complex and US industrial policy in the telecommunications sector.

Qualcomm is also relatively unique even among major US tech companies in that its CEO is a Ph.D. from a major EECS program at Cal-Berkeley. (I suppose one could argue Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google could have earned their Ph.D.s at Stanford if they wanted.)

The Chinese have always known they are behind technologically and have worked very hard including sending many of their best students to the West's best universities. Also the Chinese benefit from Taiwan acting as a buffer to facilitate further technological and business transfer. But make no mistake, the centerpiece of the Chinese strategy is an industrial policy that ruthlessly exploits the potential size of their market to force Western countries, even Qualcomm, to go to Chinese research labs and transfer their technology and business know-how.

I argue what we have really been seeing over the past five years are the opening skirmishes of a China vs Qualcomm struggle in mobile. China just wants to force a stalemate in LTE and not let Qualcomm achieve worldwide domination, one chipset to rule them, one chipset to bind them.

What China has done is to use the previous generation TD-SCDMA and now the next generation TD-LTE in the same way Qualcomm used CDMA in the US as a barrier. Apparently Huawei has some sort of patent cross-licensing agreement with Qualcomm, and China has used demonstration projects to induce industry leader Ericsson to share its expertise so that Huawei can sell abroad their new expertise in both TD-LTE and LTE FDD. The Chinese I believe wish to force a draw now with Qualcomm for the early adopter LTE makets and win the second much bigger generation of worldwide adoption of LTE.

This is the type of person the Chinese have been hiring as their CEOs in areas of tech they feel are vital:

http://www.smics.com/eng/about/management.php

Tzu-Yin Chiu is another Ph.D. in EECS from Berkeley who went on to follow the best in technology at all the best places.

And that's going to be the big China question for readers of this site who are trying to manage young careers. As so much manufacturing has shifted to Asia, and so much technology is being transferred and developed there, is the proper career trajectory going to change to where one needs to have experience at the best Asian tech companies. Or will it be possible to get such experience without the right connections? The Western universities take students from everywhere, but is it even possible for a Western student to get a Ph.D. in Asia and rise through an Asian company?

There is also a branding issue with nationalism and industrial policy involved. The United States has an extensive campaign against allowing Huawei any access into critical network infrastructure. In the US it might be a good idea for a young person to take an internship with a defense-related company, especially anything to do with AI and robotics, on the other hand if one's future is to do business in China that might just make one a target.

This is where I think the Europeans have advantages, as Ericsson has been able to benefit from. As a more neutral party, European companies like Ericsson can get lucrative contracts now providing LTE infrastructure, contracts that will require support services for decades.

I'm sorry if the above is totally incoherent, but I wanted to do a great brain dump to show how much larger the world is than debates about Microsoft's influence over Nokia.

[Winter]

@John Phamlore
"What are people going to do about China?"

Sell them stuff? Buy stuff from them?

The Germans make a lot of money selling machinery to China. They also buy a lot of stuff from China. Straight out the economics classics (Ricardo etc). You trade and get rich.

@John Phamlore
"And that's going to be the big China question for readers of this site who are trying to manage young careers."

The answer is: Learn Mandarin and get acquainted with China. If you do not like that, learn Hindi instead. Portuguese might be valuable if you rather drink good coffee.

What you will find out is that all these "rivals" are just people trying to make a living. Help them make a good living, and you can prosper. Try to stop them making a living, and you will not prosper yourself.

[Olav]

Congratulations. We come here for the excellent analyses and the famously accurate forecasts.

[Simon]

Windows Phone and Nokia mentioned near the bottom of this article:
http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/2077-who-allegedly-broke-tela%92s-patents-samsung-qualcomm-real-villain.html

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