All three major players — Apple, Google (Android) , Microsoft –have launched or announced their mobile OS the question the question we are asking is who will dominate the mobile OS ecosystem? The premise of the question is flawed. There will be no globally dominant mobile OS the way Windows dominates the PC. Just a few of many reasons:
- Price: Price-insensitive markets (e.g. most of North America and Europe) view their phones as jewelry. At $99 (iPhone 3G) it is not a very expensive piece of jewelry. Highly price sensitive markets (Southeast Asia and South America) will see Android coupled with copycat devices.
- Carrier Distribution: Carriers remain a vital distributor in most markets. They have financial (generously provided by OEM and web companies) and strategic (keep Google honest) incentives to distribute multiple platforms.
- Open Platforms Win: An overstated arguement. The 20% of apps that matter will get ported to all platforms with over 10% share and the 3-4 incremental days that it takes to get an App into the iPhone App Store is annoying but mostly inconsequential. As the mobile browsers continue to expose more device APIs the Android is open argument wears thin. OK, so you say well I want to go really deep into the mobile OS and create my own layer above the OS. There are very few companies who have the resources and skill-sets to do this. OEM’s like Motorola are trying but don’t have the right skill-set. The companies who have the resources and skill-set to this are the exact same companies who have launched their own mobile OS.
- Data Lock-In: Data you create on your device will not stay on your device the same way that data you generated on your PC 20 years ago remained there. As the world moves to the cloud in 2010 these client level data lock-in advantages are muted. More important are the cloud based data lock-in (e.g. Y!Mail, Gmail, etc.). The device is just access point.
- Application Lock-In The argument goes something like this. Users spend lots of money on Apps and music and given these investments will be locked into the platform where they made these investments. To build significant application lock-in users will need to be spending far more then $50 a year on Apps [source]. Recall, to create strong switching costs 10 years ago users spent hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suites. Could it really be anything less?
[For good history and insight into mobile fragmentation see Richard Wong's TechCrunch post and presentation]