Sometimes the insight that leads to an assault on a new market is to discover the new market hidden in the weeds of an older and established market. Incumbents in the mobile phone market have dismissed the Apple iPhone simply because the volumes of devices shipped by the leading players is so overwhelming.
Though it is less often said, the same sort of dismissal could be aimed at Android, the open-source operating system under development by Google and 30 or so other partners.
And it's hard to argue with that perspective. Unless you dig in the weeds and reimagine a market. If one looks at smart phone (perhaps more aptly described as mobile PC or mobile Web device)penetration, it is still quite low.
Looking just at smart phones, which have low penetration, the market volume to be shared by all players is still quite small, so the market share doesn't have nearly the same meaning it would in a large volume market.
"Smart phones" or "mobile Web" devices or "conference in a pocket phones" or "email in a pocket" phones remain a developing market, not a saturated market. So new players still have a shot of ultimately achieving significant influence and share, no matter how small their efforts might appear if the market is defined as "mobile phones."
Hughes de la Vergne, Gartner analyst, estimates that even powerful Symbian has just two to three percent share of the U.S. smart phone operating system market, for example.
But that's just the U.S. market. The numbers certainly look daunting just about everywhere else.
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