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What’s Behind Apple’s Patent Suit?

What’s Behind Apple’s Patent Suit?

Declining market share, that’s what! Take a look at these numbers, courtesy of the Web analytics company Quantcast.

For the month of February 2010, Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone controlled 63.7 percent of the mobile Web consumption market. Android phones accounted for 15.2 percent, and the BlackBerry had a 9.2 percent share. Obviously, Apple’s still the big dog in the yard. But when you look at it over time, it becomes a tad more troubling for the iPhone. Ever since the Android phone debuted in September 2008, the iPhone’s market share has steadily dropped from the low 70s to where it is today. The BlackBerry has more or less stayed flat at 10 percent. But after plateauing for a short spell, the Android operating system began a steady rise starting last fall, as more and more phones came onto the market. The trend seems pretty clear: The more companies offer to sell Android phones, the more people will buy them.

Still, we can’t help wondering if everyone’s overhyping what Apple’s doing here. Yes, the iPhone’s losing market share, and yes, Apple looks kinda petty by suing Google’s (GOOG) poorer relation HTC. But the iPhone is a license to print cash by the barrel. Farhad Manjoo had an excellent piece on this back in January. Unlike the ’80s, when Microsoft (MSFT) outmaneuvered Apple by licensing its operating system on the cheap and establishing Windows on every PC, Apple’s in a much better position to hold onto a commanding market share and rake in the cash. And contrary to popular myth, Apple didn’t lose the PC wars in the first place.

“Last October … Apple got nearly half of all the money spent on desktop machines at U.S. retailers, and more than one-third of the money spent on laptops,” Manjoo wrote. “So Apple is making a lot more money by selling a lot fewer machines—isn’t that winning?”

Finally, Wired has a fun thought experiment about the whole kerfuffle. Brian Chen went through each of the Apple patent challenges and wondered what an Android phone would look like if they all succeeded. Read the whole thing, but here’s the summary:

Picture an HTC Google phone whose desktop shows a grid of icons with gaps. Arrows on the screen help you navigate your windows. A physical unlock button on the phone gets you past the lock screen. Battery life could potentially be poor in sleep mode, which could be addressed with a free battery extender — or even better, a hand crank charger.

[Thanks: http://www.thebigmoney.com]

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