Corvus Consulting

Fans of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are familiar with the Infinite Improbability Drive, a spacecraft engine fuelled by the energy of highly improbably events.

Fans of this blog (both of them) will be keen to learn about the Corvus Irony Timing Chain, which prevents me from writing year-in-review posts until a few days after New Years. The Chain makes space for the news that would have contradicted, enhanced or otherwise changed what I was going write. This exclusive innovation lets me write without having to look back on a post less than a week old and feel like a dupe.

Safely a few short steps into 2011, we can look back on 2010 for what it was: an exciting year that delivered a number of inflection points.

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People in the tech world are a-talking, and the words on their lips are straight from a hot headline: WHOA: Google Android Outsells Apple iPhone in US. Like a lot of people, my first thought was that this took a lot less time than I would have thought.

There’s no doubt that mobile is shaping up as a two-horse race between Android and iPhoneOS while RIM dithers in front of a mirror trying to figure out what it wants to be. But figuring out just where each horse is on the track requires a depth of reporting that the tech press isn’t inclined to provide. To help them out, here are a few simple questions about the Android vs. iPhone numbers:

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UPDATE

On April 12 Opera was approved for the App Store. I’m not sure if they should be happy to be in or insulted that they’re not threatening, but I’m glad to see it. Congrats, team Opera.

ORIGINAL POST

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Opera browser. I used it when it was among the only ad-supported online properties, paid for a license to support them, and evangelized it to coworkers and friends. It had mouse gestures, it was FAST, it could render as a small screen interface before anyone knew why they’d want to. Then I moved to a Mac, where Opera had yet to go, and never really went back when Opera did come to that platform.

Opera has done so much right but rarely receives the credit, much less market share, that it deserves. The company’s last major strategy shift was to position their browser as the premier choice for mobile use. But Apple, Google and RIM are eating up the mobile market and all three roll their own browsers. Opera is, once again, being left out in the cold but this time isn’t so quietly accepting of its fate.

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