The way you are portraying the situation is a little absurd. A 200-300E/$ phone is a "fully featured phone" but a 300-400E/$ laptop "barely runs"? For 250E/$ you get a mediocre phone that's good for light browsing, facebooking, instagraming, or youtubing. Even the cheapest laptop or tablet can do better than that. People don't buy 200E phones because they dream of the wonderful experience they offer. Heck, more complex work is a chore even on a high end phone, let alone a 200E one.
NetMarketShare data just tells you how people browse the section of internet they are monitoring or
trends for internet usage. And the phone gives you full-time browsing: on the bus, in the elevator, while driving, in the shitter, etc. So if your life revolves around web browsing then you're good. But what about trends for anything else? What do you do when you need some productivity? Where do you go if you want to edit a 20 page document, let alone more complex tasks? The "barely runs" laptop or the "fully featured" phone?
The statistics will keep going up because data plans become cheaper and people use them to browse even more, not because the phone is some miracle device that does everything well.
Well, you can get a Galaxy J7 prime for about $200, and the Galaxy A8 and OnePlus are around the 400-500 mark. Much cheaper than a decent laptop (which over the past 10 years of laptop shopping I've found hovers around the 1200-1500 mark). Sure, it's a consumption-only device, but
that's what most people do with their computing devices outside of work! For the 3 times a year the average person needs to actually do something that requires a proper keyboard and decent screen, they'll just use their work-provided machine, or borrow a relative's computer or something of the sort.
This is especially relevant in 3rd-world countries (I'm from one, so I get to call us that!) where people have much lower incomes, and proportionally less money to spend on tech. When you have to choose between a $500 shitty PC + $100 featurephone vs dropping 400-800 on a decent smartphone, you often go towards the phone side. ESPECIALLY if your job gets you access to a real computer.
EDIT: I wouldn't buy a J-series samsung (I need real amounts of RAM on my phone), but it's perfectly adequate for most of my relatives.
EDIT2: I use Syncthing for my own syncing (I have more data synced than literally any free service allows me to store), GSuite business for my own bulk offsite storage, and oneDrive Business/SharePoint for work stuff.
That's another fair point. However, the Android and iOS market as a gaming platform are fairly robust. Mostly casual gaming stuff, but there has been steady progress to appeal to the more serious gaming audience.
Actually, you are incorrect. According to this(and many other stat gathering websites);
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/worldwide/2017
Then look at these;
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/worldwide/2016
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/worldwide/2015
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/worldwide/2014
For the last four years Windows has been on a steady decline and Android on a steady incline. In March of 2017 Android became the dominant OS. They traded places very briefly in Nov of 2017, but the trend has resumed.
It is likely to continue and Windows may very well become irrelevant on many levels before the end of the decade.
Office 2019 only supporting Win10 may become a non-issue during and after it's release.
Ignoring the points
@evernessince mentioned, the obvious, and most important missing bit in the statcounter info is the complete lack of total numbers. % changes in tech often means just changes in growth rates, and a lot less people abandoning a platform for another.
Or, you could save $100 a year, use libre/openoffice, and use google drive to share documents without paying a penny.
No office program is worth $100 a year.
OneNote is. Real OneNote, not the bastardized, useless POS that is the UWP app.
I guess Excel and PowerPoint are good too, and Work is a passable word processor... Outlook's passable too...
there are 2 classes that make up the majority of people who bother paying for officeL businesses and older folks who dont know about anything other then office, but still buy the newest as opposed to still using 2003.
Both groups still have a large number of 7 machines, and will not upgrade until they absolutely have to. Until businesses move to 10, sales will be low.
If you work with other business, people or states, you often end up using MSOffice just to keep collaboration sane. Especially if you use Excel beyond =A7+B7. A bunch of businesses have moved to 10 as well, like my dad's small consultancy. It's been great for me, since I don't need to worry about updates in particular.
