The open nature of the PC wasn’t inherently what brought it greater success. The open nature of the PC meant that it could spawn an ecosystem of third party hardware vendors, sure. It also meant that it could be cheaply cloned by other manufacturers, ensuring competition that drove down the price of hardware. The net result? x86 is ubiquitous, sufficiently so that even Apple use a basically standard x86 platform these days. Low prices and the wide availability of software that people wanted to run bought the PC the marketplace, with Microsoft being the real winners. Apple hardware remained more expensive for years, and the compelling MacOS software was mostly limited to areas like DTP. Nobody else had any incentive to buy a Mac.
Now, let’s look at the phone market. Third party hardware vendors? No real distinction between the iphone and anything else. Sure, anything remotely clever has to plug into the dock port, but developing something to work with that also gets you into the ludicrously huge ipod market. Other phone accessories are either batteries, chargers or headphones. That’s really not going to be what determines market success. (Source)
And then he writes about Symbian and Windows Mobile handsets, say negative words and I’m saying to myself that “it’s just another one of these open source idealist that bash any closed source app they see”. But it’s 7:10am and I’m already late for work so I flag the post and ran away. A few hours later, sugar in my coffee give me enough energy to make me able to actually read the post, and worse, to even agree with most of it.
Read the rest of this entry »
