Google vs Apple: Google Doesn't Need To Win
radar.oreilly.com
radar.oreilly.com
"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.
All this winner and loser and X killer is a press and blogosphere invention.
Fortunately the companies themselves know better.
Competition is a brilliant thing
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very well could be true. But is by no means proven.
The same could happen in the smart phone space : mobile app developers might be sophisticated enough to try to avoid an Apple or Google monopoly. Or not. We'll see.
The "smartest" in this area are the airlines : there is a reason why Airbus and Boeing market shares are so close from each other... competition is very very good for them, and they know it. So lots of big airlines go for both shops.
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.
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.
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.
I've corrected it now. I'd appreciate another detailed check of the revised calculations.