To be fair: it's never worked like that. If you spent the 90's on anything but windows (or the 70's on anything but IBM), you saw the same nonsense. The best you get are brief moments of purity, where the growth of a new platform or environment is so fast that it makes more sense for all the parties to collaborate instead of compete. So in the first 4 years of the "post-iPhone smartphone" world it was nice, just like it was in the early days of the internet.

It's a maturing market now, and not so nice. We have to wait for the next disruption now.

I think Apple came to the conclusion that the iPhone is entrenched and will sell tens of millions regardless of not having new design, features like NFC or great maps. The "just works" mantra is easy to get lost when the iPhone is now a cash cow(like how Windows stagnated after Windows 95 till before Windows XP). I guess the focus is now on iTV or whatever else that's being cooked up while milking the cash cows for what they're worth.

Reminds me of Avis' slogan: We try harder because we're number two.

Because he holds Apple in high regard?

Because he happens to fanboy for Apple? I can think of a lot better reasons to hate someone...

invented yes, but then totally neglected it (while retaining the Markdown name)

You'd have murdered him by now had you ever read Markdown.pl or run into its hundreds of bugs and corner cases