ASICMiner has overtaken BTCGuild and 50BTC to be the largest mining "pool" (as of this post's time stamp)!!!
http://blockchain.info/poolsShareholders rejoice!!
Didn´t he say they wanted 20% of the network and stay there. Maybe already stocking up now, as BFL seems finally about to ship bigger units.
I believe friedcat made an early conservative estimate that he would be able to hold onto 10% of the network, but that was months ago, and before it became clear that Avalon and BFL couldn't reach the scale of production as quickly as ASICMINER has been able to. I do not recall him making any adjustments to his conservative goal of 10%, however that said, it's clear that he's doing the best he can for shareholders.
Do consider that if difficulty goes up 20% on the next difficulty increase that means they have to increase hashing by 20%, that get's harder and harder to deploy as we're already talking huge amounts of HW. IE: 31TH to 37.2TH, which is basically 600 Blockerupter boards in 10 days, or 60 boards a day. Mmm. This is doable if they have the datacenter space, cooling, networking and power in place, but keeping up with difficulty is going to get harder and harder. (Bear in mind they are already managing 3100 blockerupter boards in their mining farm!!)
My gut feeling, is that they'll only be able to build so many datacenters so fast, and will likely steer a larger percentage of their hardware production towards sales. (And will steer more HW to mining as datacenters come online.)
Damn what an awesome problem to have! (Please note all numbers are approximations.)
-helixone