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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

All this nonsense about whether google or apple will win is completely besides the point anyway. Both companies will end up with some x% of the market, whoever has the largest amount will - maybe - make a bit more money, or maybe not (apple seems to be doing just fine making more money from less sales).

"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.

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Ha - that is almost precisely what I was going to say.

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

"Both Apple and Google are probably going to be fine" doesn't make for a good headline though, does it?

Where is Nokia in this game?

This *could be true, but it could well not be true.

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.

No single vendor will ever be able to displace another completely in this market, I really don't see how.

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.

But that's exactly the situation we had in the PC world in the mid-80s, when there were competing GUI environments that ran on top of DOS (Windows, GEM, Visi On). In theory, they could've continued coexisting indefinitely; in reality, network effects meant that one won out and the others died off.

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.

Funny you should remember GEM, I actually quite liked it.

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.

The open source movement missed out on the desktop wars, simply because they got off the ground much later

Very well could be true. But is by no means proven.

Apps aren't much of a network effect, though. Do you buy a phone to use third-party apps? No, you buy it to make phone calls, send text messages, browse the internet, and maybe do a few other things which are mostly supported by the phone straight out of the box. Apps are, maybe, the fourth biggest use, and a completely appless phone still fills the vast majority of use cases for the vast majority of people.

Apps may not be he most used feature of a phone, but it is one of the things that really differentiate a platform. I'd be hesitant to move to android and not be able to use all the excellent, low-priced apps for the iPhone.

Most people only find out what's in the appstore after they've bought a phone.

One counter-example : the console market. That might very well be because editors are sophisticated enough not to want a monopoly of either Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony...

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.

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