Comment by mladenkovacevic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mladenkovacevic | Hacker News Reader

mladenkovacevic

Here's why Windows possibly has a shot at regaining a meaningful presence in the mobile space.

1) the untapped market potential is still huge (I myself don't own an Android or an iPhone - although I'll be buying an Android phone soon)

2) The customers gained by Android and iOS are not as loyal or as committed to each platform as the early adopters of the home PC were. When you bought your first PC, you usually spent a lot of money on it, invested in software...etc. By contrast, most smartphone buyers just need a phone with an internet connection, decent browser and a Facebook app. Other apps and games are just a short-term bonus that quickly become a bore. Also phones are cheap or free with a contract (in North America at least) so switching after your 2-3 year prison sentence with one of the carriers is not a huge leap of faith.

Having said all this I personally hope Apple and Microsoft lose badly and Android wins. Purely based on principle and to a lesser degree my own mild case of fanboyism.

Don't forget all the music and movies that you've payed for in one market or another that you might not be able to transfer easily to your new device. Building a complete consumption ecosystem was very smart of Apple and it's why Amazon has grabbed the lion's share of Android tablets with a pretty lackluster debut.

Yeah most music is DRM-free these days but as far as most users know, their iPhone knows how to talk to iTunes and their other phone doesn't, end of story.

>The customers gained by Android and iOS are not as loyal or as committed

I doubt Windows Phone users are any more loyal. I'm a current Windows user and I intend to go back to Android. The app market is weak and multi-tasking doesn't work particularly well. I do love the Zune software though.

I'm also a Windows Phone user and the Zune software on the phone is 2nd to none. However, I do not subscribe to Zune for the simple reason that my desktop of choice is Linux and OSX and Microsoft refuses to make a way for me to be able to listen to my music on those platforms (without running a virtual). How hard is it to allow me web access to their music collection!

What I hope is that another mobile OS eat Android on its left: even more open, even less linked to big corps. This OS would be to Android what Linux is to Unix.

Are you talking about Boot2Gecko?

I personally like both and wouldn't mind either, or both, being top market share leaders. Tho Boot2Gecko is certainly years away from stability.

The problem isn't really the OS. It would be hard to find something significantly more open than stock Android sans the Google integration. The problem is that the OEMs (largely at the behest of AT&T et al) sell most of the devices with locked bootloaders.

The tablet market has the potential to be the thin end of the wedge toward fixing that though. Suppose several of the existing PC makers like Dell get into the tablet market and start offering WiFi-only devices available with stock Android and unlocked boot loaders. I have to assume that those companies would be happy to see some real competition for Microsoft for once.

The trouble is going to be that Microsoft may be back to its old tricks with regard to not allowing PC OEMs to preinstall "Linux" on their hardware. We've already heard ruminations about Win8-on-ARM requiring a locked boot loader. It remains to be seen whether the PC makers will be willing to throw their users under the bus in order to appease Microsoft.

The open nature of Android, specifically being open source can be doubted at times. There is the whole incident with Honeycomb source code, and how it wasn't released until the Ice Cream Sandwich source code was released. Even worse is that this incident was in direct contradiction to comments from one of the android leads https://twitter.com/#!/Arubin/status/27808662429. I do have large respect for how open Android is though, and how the GPL on the Linux kernel really shows how useful it is.

In regard to secure boot and Windows 8, the restrictions are a part of the Windows 8 certification system. Personally I don't think many manufacturers will want to skip windows certification, even if they have to implement the restrictions. The more I think about it, the more I see this could bring up another anti-trust case. It would probably also bring the 'do you own your device' issue to the forefront.

Would you consider Cyanogenmod to be to stock Android OSes what Linux is to Unix?

I love and use Cyanogenmod, but I think it is still too linked to Android.

3) WP8 and Windows 8 are converging into a single entity. Before long you'll be able to run a full desktop on your phone, all you need is a dock to connect it to a mouse/keyboard/monitor. This is a nice feature for a lot of people who just use their desktop PCs for typing out letters and browsing the internet.

If high-end smartphones are able to replace desktop PCs for light/casual users, Microsoft can take advantage of their desktop dominance. Apple of course could offer an OSX desktop, but Android would have to rely on gnome or kde, and although both of these are fine products, they haven't exactly proven themselves commercially.

Interesting times ahead, methinks.

Yes absolutely. Both Windows and OSX/iTunes have existing desktop/tv mediacenter lock-in they can take advantage of to secure (imprison) new customers. Android doesn't have such a firm grip on its users. The strongest lock-in Google has is their online services like Gmail, Docs etc and even there it's really easy to export everything and use it on a different platform (which ironically is why i am a Google fanboy). I don't know whether Chrome OS/GoogleTV will become a viable platform to allow Android users to easily extend their mobile computing onto the desktop and tv or maybe another Linux distro will steal that opportunity (I recently saw Canonical demontrate some pretty seamless transitioning between Android and Ubuntu). Both Microsoft and Apple are moving towards the cloud with many of their services so maybe that's where the war will be fought, but I don't know if I see the whole app ecosystems moving along with them.

On the other hand. Both of these points have been true for the past one year. It has been one whole year since WP launched. It's not like it's a brand new comer bringing something the market has never seen anymore.

And during this past year, both microsoft and nokia's market share actually decreased [1]. That's with both the points you mentioned, over one year.

Don't you agree that's enough empirical evidence that those 2 points, alone, are not enough?

[1] http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/03/brutal-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com