Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Is it really a surprise we ended up with a duopoly?

Apple was the first modern smartphone with the iPhone and quickly got apps. That caused massive growth.

Google was right there too, also had apps on a modern platform. They saw what people wanted.

Everyone else was late to the party with their modern OSes. MS, Palm, BB.

By the time they arrived Android and iOS already had a big lead. It’s hard to get a company to develop their apps for your 3rd+ place platform with almost no market share. So you have no apps. So things get worse.

It was basically first mover advantage. Palm might have been OK but they were screwed over by Verizon. MS may have survived in 3rd but they kept rebooting their platform and breaking compatibility.

Now the duopoly is too strong for anyone to break into without pouring insane amounts of cash in that will likely never return a profit.

Until there is another big shift, I don’t see things changing. The current game is over, Google and Apple are too far ahead at it.

MS had a halfway decent mobile OS, but pretty much stopped there leaving a barren software ecosystem.

I had an HP ipaq w/ windows before the iPhone and as an OS it was okay. I could do basic web browsing, email worked fine, RSS reader. I could even tether it to my laptop for reasonable pageload speeds online, I think around 1 Mbit. (Yeah, this was before the days of >3 MByte dumps on every page.)

But that was about all, and the mobile web was mostly non existent at the time. iPhones had the same problem to a lesser extent, but IIRC safari was smart enough to mostly make text readable. It was only after a few years that "mobile first" became the dominant mantra for sites.

As far as consumer appeal the ipaq was also crap on product design: it screamed business user, and I felt awkward taking it out in public and holding it up to my head. Whereas the original iPhone was sleek and instantly cool & fashionable, and not as clunky & big, it fit in the hand very well.

So MS had a passable mobile OS, they just failed in practically every other way, and their manufacturing partners never seemed to understand that a smartphone could break out of the enterprise mold.

Agreed. I had a Dell PDA with the latest version of Windows Mobile shortly before the original iPhone came out. It should have been quite capable but the interface was holding it back.

I’ve heard the OS was good underneath. But that couldn’t fix the legacy of how the UI was designed.

> MS had a halfway decent mobile OS, but pretty much stopped there leaving a barren software ecosystem

I had a WindowsCE device (an HTC slider) before I got my first Android (a Tmoble G-1). Android was vastly superior in every way it could be. It was so superior, that I never gave WinCE and Windows Phone another thought.

> MS had a halfway decent mobile OS, but pretty much stopped there leaving a barren software ecosystem.

MS had Windows CE for a very long time, they could have tried to make the UIs a bit more touch friendly (they were already pen friendly) while keeping backwards compatibility with the tons of existing software and development tools instead of forcing everyone twice to abandon their existing code for their mobile platform (once by forcing everyone to use C# and again with the new Metro stuff). Developers simply lost trust in Microsoft for doing the most anti-Microsoft thing with ignoring backwards compatibility.

You could program Windows CE with C# pretty easily. But those programs would not have worked on Windows Phone.

I did some dev on a few windows mobile devices at the time. The OS could do stuff, but it was awkward garbage. In 2007 was usability wise, a decade behind the iphone. Just painful.

I have to argue that the original iPhone, as it was released, had no apps, the camera was not good and iOS had a laughable feature set. It quickly evolved to be much better than it's initial version, but I remember being rather upset that I had wait until iOS 3 or iOS 4 to get copy and paste support - a feature which I had on my Symbian phone for literal years. And my Symbian phone had multitasking for ages too. And it could film video. The iPhone had a handful of impressive features, but it was not all too useful for the first few iterations, aside from Safari - that was a game changer. Other manufacturers weren't late to the party, they had already gone home well drunk by the time Apple arrived. Their offerings hadn't advanced much for years, and it took years for incumbents to realize they need to catch up - get their OSes to be modernized, create platforms and embrace capacitative touch screens. All this to say, initially Apple had great marketing and a great vision and a lukewarm experience delivered in a shiny package, at least that's how I experienced it.

That’s sort of what I was trying to get out with “modern“. Mostly the interface, but also OS guts. Palm was still creaking along on a very old OS stretched far beyond its design (for example).

I had an iPhone 3G running on iOS 2.0. Yes, it was missing things. But if you were coming from a non-smart phone you didn’t notice. And that’s where TONS of people came from.

> Is it really a surprise we ended up with a duopoly?

I have the strange feeling that the reason we have a duopoly is that companies can't get away with being a monopoly.

Yup! They can't give the death blow to the last competitor, so you end up with the dominant one and the open one.

Additionally its important to remember that Apple was making money on the combination of in-house hw and in-house iOS and Android was pretty much being given away for free to handset vendors - in a "commoditize your compliment" strategy.

For Microsoft to be able to make any smartphone OS margins versus Android being given away for free, they'd have to be willing to cut margin expectations or overly invest to make a "knock it out of the park" OS.

>For Microsoft to be able to make any smartphone OS margins versus Android being given away for free, they'd have to be willing to cut margin expectations or overly invest to make a "knock it out of the park" OS.

If Microsoft was able to look beyond OS margins into potential advertising revenue or App store revenue, then they could have justified the investment. But hindsight is 20/20.

I'd say it's important to remember in the 1990-2000's - its been documented that the bulk of their Windows OS capability was selling to corporations through enterprise sales and support channels. Windows OS for consumers was a bit of a pull through, tag along. Zune perhaps was the first consumer first product launch which was less than a success. Ballmer just wasn't a great customer facing guy.

I think now (in the 2020's) they've put in a solid effort to shore up their cloud business and they have about a decade of experience with direct to consumer through Xbox and Satya Nadella seems more similar to Tim Cook in terms of leadership. It could be interesting if they seriously tried again in a commoditize your complement strategy - but perhaps that ship has sailed.

Everybody forgets about sidekick in this comparison. Had apps, email(push pop3!), IM, a functional browser was a killer device esp considering what hardware they were working with at the time.

Before the iPhone I had a very nice phone with apps and a keyboard. It was a PalmOS device called the Treo650. Loved it until the company died and I went to an OG Droid.

Blackberries were the best there was for its time, they were the dominant players before the iPhone. Unfortunately RIM didn't have enough vision and simply stagnated. Maybe it was for the best, as Blackberries were even more walled in than iPhones.

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