j**h
发帖数: 173 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 PDA 讨论区 】
发信人: josh (joshua), 信区: PDA
标 题: Re: quadroid vs wintel
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Sun Dec 5 12:44:32 2010, 美东)
The elephant in the room is the network carriers, who are enormously
powerful (oligopoly) and do not want to see a dominant platform that sway
the power from them.
A second factor is that the smartphone market has been so far driven by
consumers, where user experience and consumer applications is more important
than office productivity software on PC, which happened to be controlled by
Microsoft, an OS vender. Right now Google has advantage in email (and cloud
services) and map, but Office's dominance is secured by its closed file
format, which is not the case for emails. Apple is far behind in providing
free cloud service. They are catching up, although it's not clear if they
see it as an essential feature. But again, Gmail's ecosystem is pretty good
in iOS too. On the other hand, iOS has far more excellent "long-tail" apps.
Most apps I like do not have any counterparts on Android with comparable
quality: Instapaper, Reeder, Birdhouse, Highrise, Papers, iPod, Groceries
and Instagram.
The third factor is Google. Yes, Google is becoming more and more
like Microsoft. It is not without irony that the guy who opened the attack
on Apple in terms of "openness", Vic Gundotra, was from Microsoft, where he
was known as an advocate of Windows Vista, Microsoft Office and etc, aka the
epitome of proprietary software. However, Google wins by commoditizing web/
search access on mobile devices, where it collects revenue from the ads.
Android itself makes no money. If Android "wins", Google makes more money.
If iOS "wins", Google still makes money, unless the ads revenue is shifted
from Google search to Bing, or to social networks, either way the archenemy
is not iOS. So unlike Microsoft, it has no incentive to completely
marginalize Apple in this battle. I also believe Apple's foray into ads
business is half-hearted. It's a defensive move and probably a leverage for
future negotiations with Google.
The fourth factor is developers. Microsoft's mantra is "developers,
developers, developers" and it has worked extremely hard to keep backward
compatibility for third party software developers. Most applications
developed under Windows 95 fifteen years ago can still run on Windows 7. One
analogous compatibility problem on smartphones is the consistency of user
interface across different devices. And Google has a huge segmentation
problem here. Not only the screen size differs on all sorts of Androids, but
also there are different OEM "skins", not to mention the crap-ware from the
carriers that cannot be removed. Google is certainly going to address this
problem in Gingerbread or Honeycomb, but a fundamental problem is that OEMs
have a pivotal incentive to differentiate their own devices from other
droids in order to create lock-in. It's unclear how effectively Google can
address this problem. Additionally, iOS has a head start on apps. It is well
known that developers make much more money on iOS than Android even after
recent explosion of Android share.
A final factor is Apple is not run by a salesman now or in foreseeable
future. That is totally different to early 90's.
In a word, it's nothing like Wintel. |
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