John Debay

Rolfe Winkler in the Wall Street Journal:

Android ran 84% of smartphones shipped globally in the third quarter, according to research firm Strategy Analytics, down slightly from 85% in the second quarter.

“Android’s global smartphone market share is peaking,” said Neil Mawston, executive director of Strategy Analytics. “Unless there is an unlikely collapse in rival Apple iPhone volumes in the future, Android is probably never going to go much above the 85% global market share ceiling.”

Market share over 80% is still an amazing figure. I’d like to see sales in emerging markets broken out, as I suspect China and perhaps India look completely different from the U.S. and E.U.

There’s also bad news for Samsung:

Meantime, Samsung Electronics Co.’s dominance over other Android handset makers is waning, reducing the threat that the Korean hardware maker could wrest more control from Google. In the third quarter of this year, 25% of smartphones shipped were Samsung devices. That figure fell from the year prior, when it stood at 35%.

Samsung ships mostly Android devices and long has been dominant among Android vendors thanks in part to big commissions it pays to smartphone distributors, particularly in emerging markets. That gives them an incentive to push its devices over rivals.

Yet Samsung is losing out to startups like China’s Xiaomi Inc., which are undercutting the Korean giant on price.

This was entirely predictable. Samsung is fundamentally a copycat company that makes second-rate products. Their hardware is mostly cheap plastic, even on high end devices, and their expertise in the most important differentiator for smartphones, software, is non-existant. Given the consumer-centric nature of the smartphone business, they’ve always been vulnerable to Apple closing off their high-end differentiators (screen size, some of Android’s software configurability), and commodity hardware vendors eating away at their low end.

Soraya Nadia McDonald, writing for The Washington Post:

What was strange was the mushroom cloud of controversy Buress set off repeating something he had said before — not about new allegations, but about the same 13 women who signed on as witnesses in Constand’s 2004 lawsuit.

Without intending to, Buress became a perfect example of the conundrum of male allyship: It wasn’t enough 13 different women accused Cosby of drugging, raping and violently assaulting them. It was only after a famous man, Buress, called him out that the possibility of Cosby becoming a television pariah became real.

Last month, Cosby was a guest on the “The Colbert Report.” Colbert remained in character, but was unambiguously deferential. In August, Cosby appeared on “The Tonight Show” and got similar treatment from Jimmy Fallon.

I remember seeing these late night appearances when they happened, and Bill Cosby was very much still Cliff Huxtable to me. I had no idea he was a serial rapist, but I know now.

I find these details amazing:

“There was the UI that you got if you were knighted by Steve to see these glorious pixels cause they’ll blow your fucking eyes out. And then there was this other UI that we called Skankphone for testing. It was this awful UI that allowed you to make phone calls and text, but it was these hideous red buttons and boxes.

And later:

[The team had] to go to extremes to work around the system to the point where he had to sit his own engineers next to one another with a curtain in between–one with full iPhone access, the other with Skankphone access–to debug the code.

Some good advice. One item in particular that caught my attention is:

Don’t

1. Personally fix bugs and ship features. You have to write code to remain an effective tiebreaker, but that’s where your coding responsibilities end.

I do exactly this myself and find that it’s the most effective way to manage a team. Some new engineering managers try to code too much, or have a habit of parachuting in when things go sideways to do the job themselves. I won’t say I’ve never gone into hero mode to save something, but when it happens I always treat it as a sign that I failed as a manager, and I take action afterwards to correct that.