
Owning the stack: The legal war to control the smartphone platform - shawndumas
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/owning-the-stack-the-legal-war-for-control-of-the-smartphone-platform.ars
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cageface
The desktop computer market has been extremely innovative and robust over the
last two decades without much of this kind of legal turf-grabbing. This kind
of thing is ultimately only going to hurt consumers.

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guard-of-terra
During the windows rule, hardware specs went up but not much happened
otherwise. Hard drives and RAM became 100 times bigger, but there was the same
Start button, the same IE5 that became IE6 (sigh), the same games and videos
on CDs. The only big innovative thing born in those years was 3D acceleration.

In the last few years we've seen a tremendous explosion of modern web, content
streaming services; in the same time, rich mobile devices caught traction.
They failed to do so for the whole 00s despite everyone predicting them to
each year.

Basically, that's what having a platform monopoly or having no platform at all
gets you.

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cageface
Things would have been more interesting without the Windows monopoly, I agree.
But in that time we got cheap but extremely powerful personal computers with
robust, mulitasking operating systems and a huge ecosystem of very capable
applications. Maybe there haven't been many radical innovations in the WIMP
interface but these things go in cycles and the this one served consumers very
well.

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jezclaremurugan
"Everyone wants to be part of a winning stack, but even better is to be the
bottleneck in a winning stack so that everyone else can join in only on your
terms—and at your price." That's one cool line!

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tekacs
Thanks - a brilliantly written article, as is customary at Ars...

