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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

At some point, Google is going to screw up. This will create business opportunity for anybody who's put a few years and a few hundred million into a strategic replacement. Android is already creaking at the seams in certain places, it won't be a huge surprise if some use-case comes along that invalidates enough of the platform that Google will have to replace it.

Don't forget, among the companies that are sinking money into replacing Android is also Google. They're preparing for a fight.

Times when OS's were fundamentally replaced because of industry paradigm shifts:

- Unix -> Linux

- MS-DOS -> Windows

- Windows 3.x -> Windows NT

- ProDOS -> GUI ProDOSs

- Android with a Blackberry clickwheel interface -> Android with a touchscreen

- Windows CE -> every other mobile platform

- Mac OS -> OS X

- OS/2 -> Windows NT

- CP/M -> MS-DOS

and so on.

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> At some point, Google is going to screw up.

Microsoft screwed up on numerous occasions with Windows. Once the monopoly was in place, that simply didn't matter so much. Consumer behavior reinforces the monopoly even in the case of screwing up: people very aggressively stick with what they know. The same will be true of Google-Android.

Getting consumers to switch is extremely difficult. Competing with Android is extremely expensive. Delivering your Android killer at exactly the right time, with a vast improvement over Android, with the right marketing hit, with the right partners, with the right hardware - good luck, it's not going to happen.

All true, but Microsoft (until very recently) had never tried to grab 30% (or w/e it is) of their platform's revenue through an app store. They bent over backwards for the developers by keeping old obsolete broken apps working on newer versions at zero cost to developers.

If I as a company was forced to give 30% of my revenue to Google (or apple or ms), you'd best be assured that the most important thing, long term, is to make sure I get 100% of my sales. That is a very important carrot that you can use to get developers to switch - and as you alluded to, its just one piece of the puzzle.

As for the Mac it seems we've come a full circle: Mac OS -> OS X -> macOS

For now, your point stands only from a naming convention perspective.

However, if iOS apps do come to the next version of MacOS, we might be on the verge of delineating Mac OS X and MacOS into truly-separate generations.

Actually it is more than that.

On the Mac culture, UNIX is only an implementation detail, most users don't care one second it is there.

Not even Mac developers, those that actually target Mac users, not using it as a workaround to avoid dealing with Linux/BSD issues on laptops.

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