Come 2010, the battle of the App Stores is just beginning..
kbm1.posterous.com
kbm1.posterous.com
The only question is how do you become a positive statistical outliers in a crowded market?
It's really a great market, with people actually willing to pay for software. You just have to jump through a few of Apple's hoops.
So Apple's competitors still don't get it :-(
The history of personal computing since the eighties does have something to teach us about "the power of variety". It teaches us that consumers don't rate variety very highly compared to consistency, software compatibility and -- above all -- price. In the early 1980s there was a wide variety of microcomputer operating systems and hardware platforms to choose from. Today, we are down to two operating systems, broadly speaking -- Windows and Unix -- and pretty much one PC hardware platform, built around commodity x86 processors and their associated commodity motherboards and peripherals.
Commodity PCs grew to dominate the market because they were a commodity, which is another way of saying that they were essentially all the same. For a while you couldn't even get them in a different color; if you didn't like beige you had to go buy some spray paint and mod your own case. If you bought a PC you knew that it would support a standard monitor and a standard PC mouse and a standard PC keyboard and would run Microsoft Excel if you wanted to pay the standard price for the standard-issue operating system.
The major reason why PC manufacturers proliferated so wildly was price, but that battle is largely over: Twenty-five years of price wars and middleman-elimination, aided by the internet, have done their work, and now literally everybody has their hardware built by Foxconn or some other company within half an hour's bicycle ride of Foxconn, and it all costs roughly the same feature-for-feature. It's just a different world than it used to be.
You are making the same mistake with regards to competition as communism does. In retrospect it is easy to look back and say what 'consumers' wanted but that ignores the competative pressures that lead to the emergence of the 'winner' solutions. Consumers do not need to be aware of the power of variety to benefit from it, although collectively they do have a great 'variety' of differing needs.
Of course the system the won out was the one to fostered the greatest levels of competition within that system, using standards and interoperability to facilitate this.
> The major reason why PC manufacturers proliferated so wildly was price, but that battle is largely over:
Seriously the era of innovation in computer hardware is over? The whole thing just runs like clockwork now and no further major disruptive forces will change the industry? I'm sure in the 70s you would have predicted that IBM would rule the industry forever.
The costs are put off over a long enough time that people with ok incomes will go for the best phone instead of the $30 saving. It just isn't enough of a difference to elicit a gut level "let's look at alternatives" reflex. Margin whoring killed the Macintosh, not openness.
All this leads to where I think Android can actually get a beachhead outside of the geekier open source crowd- price conscious teenagers.
Further, pricing differences are generally carrier based, not device based- once iPhone is on Verizon, the monthly cost for unlimited data will be the same as getting a Droid, negating any advantage. Third rate carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint will offer lower cost plans, but they too will eventually get iPhones.
I just don't see how there are 'openness' advantages this time around- I think last time, 'openness' was really 'pricing'.
You must have missed that whole 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' phase of the internet. Were you an adult during this phase or did you just not agree with (or notice) the whole idea? The whole move towards more open technologies is widely recognised as being a continuing trend. On the scale of things a closed product such as the iPhone is a fairly minor aberration.
Anyway to direct address your conclusion - pricing is always relative to quality/performance. Delivering clearly superior hardware at the same cost is also 'pricing'. Out of all the the android phones being released some will certainly achieve this, if you don't believe they have already.
Dismal demonstrations of the "power of variety" in the media player and media store markets, among other things.
I can only guess it is some MBA induced pricing scheme that leads to the product multiplicity. It's supposed to fool buyers into choosing the next higher priced model (by adding features one at a time), and make it difficult for them to compare models.
If the manufacturer doesn't know how to make one good phone, maybe they should just quit.
Apple's doing really well because they've carved out a niche for themselves. The 18% market share in Smartphone Market equals to about only 1% of the entire Mobile Market. Motorola held a 30%+ market share in the entire Mobile Market not too long ago which is what I guess they're setting their sights on again.
As far as developing 1 phone to rule all: Apple's very uniquely positioned and they're probably one of the only few companies that can pull this off. The ecosystem they've created around iTunes is very powerful.
I've used a Nexus One, Palm Pre over the last few weeks and even though they are fantastic devices I'll still switch back to the iPhone because I have a fantastic Desktop Counterpart i.e. iTunes.
Apple has been making inroads into the PC market, so the old model of fooling the customer doesn't really work anymore. Why do they all stick to the outdated model, and why would they also try the same thing with mobile phones?