Watts Martin on Google vs. Android, and lessons from history

> The conditions that happened for the collapse of the pre-IBM PC market don’t > exist now, and that collapse was—if not unique—certainly very unusual. > There’s no reason to think that there *will* be only one winner in the > smartphone market, one winner in the tablet device market, and so on. There > may be just one or two market leaders, but the iPhone doesn’t have to “fail” > for Android to succeed and vice-versa. And if those two are the market leaders > (likely but not a given) that doesn’t mean that WebOS, Windows Phone 7, > Blackberry, Symbian and Meego are doomed. Well put. Recent history proves that Apple does best when there are more than a few competitors in the market. When they go one-on-one with a company, like say, Microsoft, they lose, because people see it as an all-or-nothing proposition. But as long as there are four or five healthy players in the market, as there are now in Mobile, Apple can take a nice large chunk of the most profitable customers and make out just fine. The iPod never killed all other music players outright, after all. There were always several alternatives that fought over what remained of the cheap end of the market.

I agree very strongly with Martin when he says that compatibility issues don’t really exist the way they used to, as well. Email, text documents, photos, music, video: Most of these file formats are predominantly open standards now. So there’s little reason to feel that you NEED to have an Android or an iOS device. You could switch back and forth with minimal fuss. And if work mandates one platform, but you use another at home, no big deal.

I think Android has proven that it’s here to stay. Whether or not Google can turn Android into a profitable business for its software developers, or whether or not it even cares about that, is yet to be seen. I have a hard time believing that Android can take a serious chunk of market share away from Apple without a MAJOR turnaround in the quality of available apps. (Notice, to date, all of Google’s growth has been at the expense of Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, etc. Platforms with even crappier available software—Apple is still growing market share.) My hunch is that Google isn’t supporting app development in any meaningful way because it would rather see all apps go to the cloud, the only place where Google ever makes money on ads. But I’ve been hearing that all computing is headed to the browser for almost a decade now, and it hasn’t happened yet.

Without any really good apps (talking quality, not quantity here), Google is going to have a tremendously hard time getting people to give up the iPhone in favor of Android. And until that happens, you can’t dominate the market. Remember, the Zune did a great job of killing a lot of lesser music players; but it never put a dent in Apple’s sales. So far, that’s a closer comparison to iOS and Android than Mac and PC.