“From Microsoft to Dell to Motorola, 2008 has been a very burdensome year for number-chasers. For those who find value in and thus only pay attention to market share, units shipped and revenue, the argument for volume is becoming increasingly more difficult to justify,” Kontra writes for counternotions.

In What Sony Ericsson Must Do To Stage a Comeback, Jose Fermoso includes an interesting table:

Kontra writes, “In any argument advanced to show why, for instance, Nokia is trailing Apple in the smartphone market, some will always counter by pointing to Nokia’s volume dominance in units shipped, which dwarfs Apple’s by a factor of 25X. Nokia’s revenue is about 1.5X higher than Apple’s as well. What’s more interesting for shareholders, however, is the fact that Apple’s profit is more than 2X over Nokia’s. Indeed, for every phone sold in this scenario, Apple makes over 55X in profits compared to Nokia.”

“Surely, products without significant market share will fail to create an ecosystem necessary to garner mind share, developer interest and, ultimately, users,” Kontra writes. “Android is not yet a significant threat to iPhone because it doesn’t nearly have a comparable ecosystem and because it doesn’t have a significant ecosystem it hasn’t been able to attract enough developers to create one. Google may be able to fund Android’s growing pains, but a company like Palm cannot do the same for its upcoming Pre.”

Kontra writes, “Pre has to compete directly against the iPhone. But while Palm continues to spiral downward financially quarter-by-quarter, its competitor Apple is very profitable, likely to have about $30 billion in cash by the time the first Pre is sold… The iPhone is an extremely profitable product which fuels its own R&D that keeps it a generation ahead of its potential rivals.”

Read the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: As we’ve said repeatedly (as recently as this past Wednesday): “The fact is that Palm simply does not have the resources with which to effectively compete with Apple, much less create another mobile platform (especially one that is superfluous), or to even bring their Prevarication to market… It’s nothing more than takeover bait.”

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Spark" for the heads up.]