iOS on the rise in the US, Android continues European conquest
In the article, we can see the percentages of well known smartphones used in different countries. In 2012, the market share of iOS in US experienced a massive increase of 14.2%. On the other hand, Android’s share dropped about 10%. Another notable decline was BlackBerry, which is now below Microsoft’s OS. However, the rest of the EU5 (France, Germany, Italy and Spain) were just the opposite; Android’s share went up, iOS’s share went down. We can observe both the information-based principles and the direct-benefit principles from the above data.
Based on the information-based principles, “an information cascade has the potential to occur when people make decisions sequentially, with later people watching the actions of earlier people, and from these actions inferring something about what the earlier people know (484)”. The recent launching of the iPhone 5 had a huge impact on the U.S smartphone market, and this phenomenon is mainly due to the information cascade. After the first few people who bought iPhone 5 showed positive payoffs, the potential smartphone buyers were influenced by the positive payoffs of the previous iPhone 5 users when buying their new smartphones. They chose iPhone 5 over the other smartphones that are as good as iPhone 5 or even better because they saw the positive payoffs of iPhone 5 by the previous users. They valued the other people’s feedback more than their own (ignoring their own signal). Thus, due to the information cascade, a massive increase of 14.2% in iSO was achieved in the U.S smartphone market.
Based on the direct-benefit principles, “for some kinds of decisions, you incur an explicit benefit when you align your behavior with the behavior of others (509)”. We can observe this phenomenon from the rest of the EU5’s case. In Europe, Android users are the majority of the smartphone users (over 50%). Therefore, even with the launching of the new iPhone 5, potential smartphone users in Europe chose the Android phone over the iPhone because there is more benefit using the same smartphone server as their friends’; for example, you can enjoy playing a game (or using an application) more if there are a lot of people playing the game with you. Thus, due to the direct-benefit principle, the percentage of the Android users increased in Europe.
http://www.gsmarena.com/ios_on_the_rise_in_the_us_android_continues_european_conquest-news-5027.php
Definition Citation:
Easly, Kleinberg. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World. Cambridge University Press, 2012.