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Comment by bilal4hmed | Hacker News Reader

we kinda did in the beginning with Nokia, Blackberry, Palm, Microsoft with maybe Nokia and Palm having the most potential. Sadly those companies got complacent and the devs didnt want to support multiple platforms and we are here today with 2 platforms.

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Yeah, funny, they didn’t feel like they were being complacent. I remember reading interviews at the time, with some of those vendors touting their “speed of innovation.” They all felt that way until Apple showed them how it’s really done. Only a very few global organizations even have the capacity to dream about designing/building/shipping hardware on the cadence and scale that Apple does. I can’t think of a single vendor that succeeds at it for anything non-trivial.

At that point I would say Nokia had that sort of prowess but their hubris overtook every thing

First it was resistive touch screens

Then it was symbian not adapted for touch , then meego not merging with symbian

They just got lost in their own thoughts

Frankly having to support 3 platforms, two major ones and a minor one (Windows) was something no customer of mine was keen of. Multiplatform tools were not that great so they had to spend three times the same amount of money instead of two to do native development and testing, plus the extra complexity of the design process because of different UI patterns. Everybody was hoping that Windows Mobile would die and it did.

I believe that 2 is a magic number here, and we are stuck with it. No new platform can emerge unless it supports every app from one of this two.

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