Venture Capitalists Expecting Android to Catch Up to iPhone In No Time
Reuters is reporting that some of Silicon Valley’s top Venture Capitalist firms are expecting a head-to-head horse race between Android and the iPhone as early as the end of this year. After beating the iPhone in Q1 in terms of market share (shipping 28% of devices ahead of Apple’s 21% with 65,000 devices per day), capitalists expects the upward trend to continue to grow at a tremendous rate.
Redpoint Ventures‘ Chris Moore is expecting Android to meet or surpass the iPhone in the middle of 2011, at the latest. Rich Wong of Accel Partners – who invests in the biggest online social network, Facebook – also reminds us that the iPhone has just as much room to grow as it does to fall as the elasticity of the mobile phone space never wears down.
It’s not going to be a winner-takes-all environment. I think the fragmentation in this mobile space is forever.
David Weiden of Khosla Ventures – who invests in the popular Jawbone headsets – also says that there is no clear winner to be seen for the near future. While each OS vendor has their place in market share, he suggests that the instability of the market’s fragmentation makes this a toss-up for anyone to grab and take all the way (at least, for a little while).
For Android, venture capitalists are confident that it has a real shot at being able to jump higher than the rest to grab onto a significant piece of the market share and maintain the hold for a long while. With Silicon Valley’s increased confidence in Android and its growth potential, there’s no reason it couldn’t become a reality.