Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland and I'm here with Benedict Evans, who's actually just joined Andrewson Horwitz recently.

Moved all the way from London. He's a longtime mobile analyst and an all-around smart fellow. Benedict, welcome.

Hello. Great to be here at A16Z. Z.

Z, as they say.

It makes for good band name.

ZZTOP.

Well, you have to start the band.

So let's talk about mobile, which you like to talk about and think about.

There's been a lot of Windows OS, Windows Mobile, sort of news out recently out of Mobile World

Congress.

But is the war for the mobile OS already over?

Well, short answer, yes.

But it's not quite clear what that means in as much as Apple has about, well, in the launch quarter,

they have about 10% of all the phones sold on Earth.

And Android has another 45% to 50%, although only about two-thirds of those are Google Android

and one-third are in China and don't have any Google services.

And the remaining half

all they're about so the phone market will convert over the next three or four years to phones

running smart OSs or there'll be a kind of a residue of 5 or 10% of people who really can't

afford them. And actually the interesting question is how many people have an affordable data plan

rather than how many people have a phone running Unix or some other operating system. And all the remaining grace is going to be

at super low prices. You know, it's going to be at $50 or $75 or $25. And there's a little bit of

...