Month: December 2010

This is what’s happening:

It was not long ago that Nokia held over 70% of the Indian market. That market is now larger but the share for Nokia has dropped by half at least. The share was not lost to Samsung but to 63 new entrants. They managed to capture 40% of the market, roughly equal to what Nokia lost. These new vendors will launch Android phones next year or the year after that.

From an IDC article (which the above post links to):

The number of handsets shipped in the country during the year is forecast to be 156 million, including nearly 6 million smartphones.

Android gained acceptance in India as a mobile OS, with 9.4 percent of smartphones shipped in the third quarter based on Android (this is almost 600,000 Android phones in the country).

The number of models with Android OS also increased to 19 in the third quarter, up from just two models in the same quarter last year.

I’d always read the news as a part of my writing ritual: wake up, go to the newsstand, buy the Times, the Post, the Daily News, get coffee and a bagel, sit down with the papers, read until an un-definable click occurred and I started writing. But a newspaper in your hand is a quiet thing, even when it’s a tabloid. When I gradually switched over to getting my news on the web, it was like walking into Internet Fight Club, with articles headlined to incite arguments from anonymous commenters who left thousands of angry, misspelled, and misinformed comments for others, also leaving the same, and each side returning to leave more, driving traffic. Reading the Times/Post/Daily News no longer elicited the click. Now, reading it online, it was the readerly equivalent of listening to cats on meth.

Bingo.

Read the full essay. It’s worth the ten of fifteen minutes it’ll take (unless something on-screen distracts you, of course).

Tom Friedman (who has said these same things many times) stands vindicated by WikiLeaks:

Yes, these are our allies — people whose values we do not and never will share. “O.K.,” our Saudi, Gulf, Afghan and Pakistani allies tell us, “we may not be perfect, but the guys who would replace us would be much worse. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are one-faced. They say what they mean in public and private: They hate America.”

That’s true, but if we are stuck supporting bad regimes because only worse would follow, why can’t we do anything to make them reform? That brings us to the sobering message in so many of these cables: America lacks leverage. America lacks leverage in the Middle East because we are addicted to oil. We are the addicts and they are the pushers, and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.