The author makes a fair enough point that Android is basically the operating system vendors and carriers have been forced to choose if they have any hope of competing against Apple and AT&T.
But think back 25 years ago when PC vendors were in a similar quandary. The could come up with their own hardware/software stack; they could partner with Microsoft and install DOS (and later Windows); or they could sit out and watch Apple eat up the personal computer market.
This is playing out exactly like the personal computer saga of the 80s and 90s. Apple wanted to go it alone with a closed, arguably superior ecosystem while the hardware partners and Microsoft (then) / Google (now) are left pushing the open environment.
Me, as a developer, I can't fault the iPhone. I really enjoy the platform. Sure there are things that I wish it could do, but I tend to agree with Apple's stance on most aspects.
I remember developing for J2ME handsets in the past - That was a nightmare:
I created an XMPP application and one thing in particular that stuck with me was that I was testing on a Sony Ericsson that was maybe 6 months old. A few weeks in to development I got another midlevel Sony Ericsson handset. The newer phone didn't support a feature that the older one did! (I can't particularly remember what it was - It was something really silly - like it didn't support alerts or something...)
You ended up just supporting the lowest common denominator (Or trying too.) Argh! It was a nightmare - Every phone had its own UI and of course you couldn't test on every model (Who could afford that?). Phones didn't have the same amount of physical buttons. Every vendor implemented the SDK differently.
Of course back then I wished that Flash Lite was released. I would have happily worked inside a non fragmented sandbox.
We didn't even have browsers that you could reliably support. You just had to support the lowest common denominator and that was that.
Openness isn't a desirable quality to most people, outside of the geek circle. It's the results, a richer environment of products and features, better support, customization, and speed of implementation that appeal to people.
Maybe not "consumer" type customers, but it may well be to more sophisticated customers such as businesses, who want to have more control, not be locked in, want to be able to do their own integrated systems, etc...
Not sure I agree with that. The problem with Windows Mobile was that there was no vertical integration. Who do I call when I have a problem? The phone manufacturer? The OS supplier?
Blackberry has been very successful in the business world because they control the hardware and the OS. If there's a problem (and you can't tell if it's hardware or software related), you resolve it through one company.
Like I said, that's not necessarily the point. From an IT manager's perspective, vendor support is just as important, if not more important than a product's features. When a company owns the OS and the hardware, there is no buck passing for blame. It all goes to one vendor.
This is playing out exactly like the personal computer saga of the 80s and 90s... We all know how this story ends...
Look, we've got to declare a moratorium on this glib analogy. The 1980s were about a hundred years ago in terms of computing history.
In 1980, the year the IBM PC was released, there was no such thing as the Web, let alone web standards. The Internet's users, if gathered together, would fit in a fairly small conference room, and they were all academics and DoD researchers exchanging email.
Mass-market computers were lonely and isolated. They communicated with each other via tapes -- or, if you had the money, nice big fast 140k floppy disks -- that were sent through the mail, or via the awesome 300 baud modem, which was three to ten times slower than reading speed. There was no standard for data interchange other than the plain ASCII text file: Every program on every platform had its own data storage standard, and its own display model, and had to be custom compiled in place. The X window system was still four years in the future, for god's sake.
The free software movement hadn't been invented yet. Linux was ten years in the future. Unix was largely an academic thing.
Everything in computing was literally one million times more valuable in 1980 than it is today. [1] This, alone, renders these analogies to the 1980s invalid. These days we have disposable technologies that are a thousand times more powerful than the Apple II. You can buy shoes that are smarter than the IBM PC. If I feel "locked in" to my proprietary iPhone and crave the netbook experience, I spend 200 bucks and buy a netbook. That's less than last week's restaurant budget, I'm afraid. (I splurged.)
Apple's "closed" ecosystem is invisibly connected to the net 100% of the time through the air, is largely constructed out of free software maintained by a ragtag network of volunteers, and has a standards-compliant web browser as its core feature. Google's "open" ecosystem depends crucially on a distant, proprietary network of machines, itself more powerful than the dreams of 1980s science fiction, that runs secret algorithms to compile and correlate data on the entire world. And people keep trying to pretend that the lessons of the 1980s are actually relevant. It's like trying to predict the future of auto racing by analyzing the results of the 1899 Kentucky Derby.
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[1] Moore's Law: Everything doubles in about 18 months. 1980 = 30 years ago = 20 doublings; 2^20 is about 1 million.
What? While charmingly nostalgic, none of what you said is the slightest bit relevant to the discussion.
The fact remains that what's happening in the smartphone market looks an awful lot like what happened with PCs. Apple wanted to control the entire computing experience by owning the hardware and the software. They shot for the moon, missed and allowed Microsoft to enjoy a couple decades as one of the largest companies in the world.
Here they are 25 years later trying the exact same trick with phones. And if you've seen the Android sales figures for this quarter, it's starting to look like they've already begun their slide into the comfortable little luxury market they knew so well for all those years.
Only time will tell if this is a case of history repeating itself or not, but as Varian (now Google's chief economist) and Shapiro wrote: “Ignore basic economic principles at your own risk. Technology changes. Economic laws do not.”
Indeed, their book opens with an example from 100 years ago that is perfectly relevant today.
Oh, snarky, bitter Apple-bloggers, can you learn to write without subtly (or not so subtly) insulting everybody else? Is it any wonder that people still think of apple users as elitist?
It seems none of them can even begin to imagine people actually preferring another product over an iPhone. I was a happy iPhone user for close to 2 years until I got my Nexus One, and now I am a happy Android user.
I'm fed up with the snarkiness from Apple lovers and haters. I have several Apple products, MBP, iPhone, and Airport Base Station and I have never touted that they are superior or better than other offerings out there. I just silently go along and do my own thing and still attract tons of negative comments. There seems to be an inferiority complex in both Apple fanboys and Apple haters.
Technology in general tends to bring out strong behaviours that seem to be based on cognitive dissonance.
Whether you're talking about Apple/Linux/Windows, XBox/Nintendo/PS3 or Canon/Nikon, you're going to see discussions branch out into quasi-religious debates.
"I have several Apple products, MBP, iPhone, and Airport Base Station and I have never touted that they are superior or better than other offerings out there."
This is some pretty serious monkey math. It doesn't matter that Android outsold iPhone 28% to 21%, it says, because iPhone grew from 16%. It omits the fact that Android grew from near 0.
It's not hurting the iPhone yet because the industry is still in a growth phase, and even with RIM holding steady there was still a 50% market share held by increasingly irrelevant OSes like Symbian and WinMo.
The real test will be the upcoming year. Most of the other OSes have faded away at this point. There's not enough marketshare left for both to grow like they did last year.
It is a question of comparing bananas with bananas and apples with apples. (No pun intended.)
Android is growing as other manufacturers switch their OS to it. These same manufacturers are loosing market share to Apple. Android will continue to grow until all manufacturers that don't have their own viable OS have migrated. How much market share these manufacturers will hold in the future against Apple and Blackberry (perhaps HP in the future?) is the real question.
No one manufacturer may top Apple individually, and it won't matter. The precise reason Android will grossly outsell iPhone in time is that it will have the collective R&D and marketing and carrier biz-dev of every major manufacturer but one.
It's a perfect repeat of what happened in home computing and it will end the same way. And just like there, Apple won't be too pissed because they'll still make a fortune. Owning the high-end 5% of a market is sometimes as good as (or better than) being the dominant force in the other 95%.
<sarcasm>So, basically the author is saying that against the OS of no-choice (iPhone OS), Android is the choice for those that have no choice.</sarcasm>
Seems a bit lop sided. The way I see it, Android is for those who prefer an OS Of-choice.
The question, though, is whether Android is stealing a portion of Apple's market. Or if they are both just stealing off of other areas.
I suspect the latter. In which case it makes sense that more phones = more market grab.
I suspect Apple are perfectly happy with a 21% market share on one phone (compared to a combined market share of 28% with multiple phones across multiple manufacturers).
Will be interesting to see what happens when the decreasing market share of Symbian/WinMo etc. reaches it's minimum and the "newer" OS's have nowhere else to steal but from each other.. :D
But you can say that about any essay with a well constructed thesis. Given that a well constructed thesis is considered a hallmark of "good" writing, you can say that about any "well written" essay. My point being that supporting evidence and elaboration are worth something. You shouldn't critique an author for supplying them. Especially when it isn't that hard to find other things in the essay to critique.
But think back 25 years ago when PC vendors were in a similar quandary. The could come up with their own hardware/software stack; they could partner with Microsoft and install DOS (and later Windows); or they could sit out and watch Apple eat up the personal computer market.
This is playing out exactly like the personal computer saga of the 80s and 90s. Apple wanted to go it alone with a closed, arguably superior ecosystem while the hardware partners and Microsoft (then) / Google (now) are left pushing the open environment.
We all know how this story ends...