
Google vs Apple: Google Doesn't Need To Win - monkeygrinder
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/google-vs-apple-round-1.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+oreilly%2Fradar%2Fatom+%28O%27Reilly+Radar%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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jacquesm
All this nonsense about whether google or apple will win is completely besides
the point anyway. Both companies will end up with some x% of the market,
whoever has the largest amount will - maybe - make a bit more money, or maybe
not (apple seems to be doing just fine making more money from less sales).

"Winning" assumes a loser, and both Google and Apple are going to be around
for a long long time.

The real winner in this battle is the consumer, both companies will do their
best to get as large a share of the market as they can get, and they'll do so
by coming up with ways of doing stuff cheaper, better, more polished or more
powerful than they ever would do if they were not in a competitive situation.

Let's hope neither will win. And that they'll keep trying.

~~~
Charuru
This *could be true, but it could well not be true.

In any system with a powerful network effect, such as: a platform with more
users will get more apps, and the platform with more apps will get more users,
there definitely could be a winner or loser!

If one platform has too much momentum, displacing it might become next to
impossible. Think x86, or the telephone platform by American Telephone &
Telegraph.

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jacquesm
No single vendor will ever be able to displace another completely in this
market, I really don't see how.

Right now there are already at least 4 different smart phone lineages and you
can expect that number to increase in the future. Each of those will find
their following, some will be more successful than others, but nobody will be
able to claim the cake for themselves.

We're not talking about network effects to the exclusion of others, after all
if there is a 'niche' then someone will fill it.

Imagine today there would be nobody developing for the android, then that by
itself would be an enormous incentive to develop for it because you'd be king
of the hill instantly. Users don't need 100,000 apps, they need at best a few
that work, so you'd only need to clone the 'top sellers' in order to have
significant presence, and that is not at all impossible.

Smartphones are like computer systems, just like apple managed to stay alive
in spite of limited marketshare and linux has a dedicated following and both
of them competed with microsoft (which used every dirty trick in the book)
they _still_ persisted.

And yesterdays 'loser' seems to be todays winner, elsewhere someone is asking
where Nokia is, you could ask the same thing about Sony-Ericsson and
Microsoft.

They'll all be back, they'll learn from their mistakes and will attempt to get
another piece of the pie.

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metageek
But that's exactly the situation we had in the PC world in the mid-80s, when
there were competing GUI environments that ran on top of DOS (Windows, GEM,
Visi On). In theory, they could've continued coexisting indefinitely; in
reality, network effects meant that one won out and the others died off.

Now, granted, the big difference there was that MS had an advantage over its
competitors, since they made the platform everybody was building on. The flip
side, though, is that it was possible to install multiple windowing systems on
the same PC, so that users didn't have to pick one and stick with it. With
cellphones, you can't do that. The closest you come is being able to move your
SIM from one phone to another; but you leave all your data behind.

~~~
jacquesm
Funny you should remember GEM, I actually quite liked it.

Digital Research made some nice things.

I agree, there _can_ be such an effect, but since every phone carries
windowing system and OS on board from a single vendor (for the most part) the
competing standards are not running on the same hardware. In other words, you
are not going to take your iphone and put android on it, unless you are
exceedingly technical. (in the end it is just software, so sure, it can be
done).

Then there is the fact that there are already open software stacks for phones
and I expect that trend to continue.

The open source movement missed out on the desktop wars, simply because they
got off the ground much later, but I expect the cell phones arena to be
different in that respect.

Android is a really big step in the opening up of the cell phone world.

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glhaynes
_The open source movement missed out on the desktop wars, simply because they
got off the ground much later_

Very well could be true. But is by no means proven.

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Terretta
I agree with Loukides' premise--I commented yesterday that Fox and HBO have
different business models, and there's clearly room for both.

What Mike Loukides overlooks while discovering that HTML5 is important is that
initially "developers" complained when Apple, and Jobs, said "to put your apps
on the iPhone, use HTML5". The iPhone was released without an Objective C SDK.
Developers didn't want to make HTML5 apps, begged for the Objective C SDK, and
we got what we asked for.

Apple doesn't need to be persuaded about HTML5, developers do. A majority of
the apps on my iPhone would work just fine as HTML5 apps.

HTML5 apps on the iPhone are true citizens. They are installable from the web
(no app store required). They are stored on the iPhone and run offline. They
use persistent storage. You can even program games:

> "And there’s no easier way to get an app than by installing it right from
> its website - that’s right, easier than the App Store. One tap and you’re
> set. Because it’s a web app, see. Not one of those where you need to be
> online either - once you add Pie Guy to your home screen, it’ll run even
> when you’re not connected to the Internet. And of course, your game will be
> saved to a local database. Read on."

<http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guy>

Write once run anywhere HTML5 is nearly within reach largely thanks to the
ubiquity of WebKit. Apple made WebKit truly "open", its openness driving
adoption as a core technology across multiple devices. Adobe's Flash runtime
being bundled in Chrome isn't the same sort of open, so Adobe has some work to
do to put Flash everywhere.

However, I'd prefer Adobe sort out how to let their same developer tools
generate HTML5 apps built for each phone. That's the right kind of open:
Adobe's tools would generate the same readable text files a human can with
notepad, but the tools become worth buying as a productivity booster, not as
the way to publish opaque files to a proprietary plugin.

~~~
sciolistse
> Apple doesn't need to be persuaded about HTML5, developers do.

This is only really true if you're not interested in the 1-3g users. The
reason developers didn't take to the HTML5 solution was that it was too slow
for anything non-trivial.. I don't personally even care for it when making
trivial applications, due to the half second delay before interactions make it
to your javascript events in WebKit on my 3g phone. The linked game (which
isn't particularly complicated) is completely unplayable on it.

But sure, on the current (3g s) and future gens, it does seem like a
reasonable alternative.

~~~
glhaynes
Other problem is you don't have access to a listing on the App Store and the
single-tap buying process that goes with it.

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Terretta
Ok, but if you want to sell in Apple's store, well, it's their store. Drafting
behind a brand comes with some caveats that are up to the guy driving.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Simple calculus shows that under certain models of consumer markets there is
space for two big players. Optimal pricing of commodity goods shows that the
share of the market is provably strictly less than 50% at the optimum price.

OK, now Google and Apple aren't producing commodity goods, and the model is
extremely simplistic, but nonetheless there is probably space for two big
players.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=488663>

~~~
NickPollard
Interesting link, but it seems (to me) to make a mathematical mistake in that
it assumes the drop-off factor (a) to be greater than 1 (in that it assumes 2a
>= 2), when at the top it asserts only that a > 0.

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RiderOfGiraffes
There was a mistake, but it wasn't the one you think. The derivative was
incorrectly stated as N-2ap instead of N-2ap+ac.

I've corrected it now. I'd appreciate another detailed check of the revised
calculations.

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adolph
There is no insight in this article. The author makes some asymmetric
assertions. Google doesn't have to blahblah; Apple must blahblah; Apple can't
take Google on as long as they ignore Flash.

