> The death of the iPhone is being foretold and the outlook for the PC and laptop aren’t much better. Influential security company CEO [Eugene Kaspersky](http://www.kaspersky.com/virusanalysts) told *PC Advisor* at [InfoSec](http://www.infosec.co.uk) Tuesday that both are set to be consigned to history. > > The iconic Apple iPhone will either not exist or occupy a very small niche satisfying the needs of committed Mac fans around five years from now, predicts Kaspersky. > > The founder of [Kaspersky Lab](http://www.kaspersky.co.uk/) says that of the five main mobile platforms currently in existence, the only two guaranteed to last beyond the next five years are Android and Symbian. Open-source platforms will outlast closed systems such as the iPhone OS, BlackBerry OS and Windows Mobile, believes Kaspersky. To survive, the closed systems need to change their approach and get rid of their restrictions for developers, he says. > > If Apple doesn’t change its approach, the iPhone will become a niche model for fans of Apple, but it will not be a mass market product, says Kaspersky. However, the security company chief, whose main focus is on keeping malware off “digital devices”, believes Apple boss Steve Jobs is content for this to be the case. Yeah. I’ll check in with you in five years and see how that theory of yours panned out.

When are techno-geeks going to get it into their heads that customers couldn’t care less about the difference between “Open” and “Closed” platforms? All the user cares about is “does it work?” And traditionally, Open platforms don’t work, unless you’re an über-nerd who likes troubleshooting your broken, incomprehensible system.

In the entire history of computing thus far, Open has never succeeded over Closed. Microsoft is a closed platform. Linux was its Open competitor. We all know how that turned out.

Also, people who cling to the naive belief that Android is Open are never going to get any respect from me. Google is as closed as Apple or Microsoft ever were. If you don’t believe me, just ask them to release their search algorithms or their Ad technology. Android is worse than a traditional closed system, because it lures you with the illusion of being open. But at the end of the day, Google will clamp down on developers just as hard as anyone else if their core business is threatened, or if they think it will benefit them.

Take, for instance, the recent embracing of Adobe Flash. Rather than continuing to help Apple promote the Open, standards-based HTML 5, Google jumped at the opportunity to screw HTML 5 developers by allowing the very Closed Flash plugin on Android devices. Why? So it could maybe hope to grab a few sales away from Apple.

The problem with the Open software movement is that it has never figured out a way to make money. And money drives everything in technology. I’m not blaming Google for not being open, or not always promoting Open technologies. After all, they are a company. They need to make money.

> Last week, McAfee [broke](http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/04/broken-mcafee-dat-update-cripples-windows-workstations.ars) a lot of its customers’ computers. A virus definition update caused a false positive identification of a virus within a key Windows file. > > McAfee initially [tried to downplay the issue](http://siblog.mcafee.com/support/mcafee-response-on-current-false-positive-issue/), claiming only “moderate to significant” issues on affected machines, and that the default configuration of its software was harmless. “Not booting properly and being useless for real work” strikes us as somewhat worse than “moderate to significant,” and there are many reports from people saying that McAfee is wrong about the default configuration (the situation seems unclear, but it looks like upgrades and certain patches can result in a different “default”—one that isn’t safe). As if that was any consolation—none of the settings should result in machines getting broken. Ultimately, such quibbling is irrelevant: tens or hundreds of thousands of machines were disabled by the virus update. Another article that makes me glad I’m a Mac user. I suppose you can consider anti-virus software a necessary evil on the PC, but I don’t consider using a PC necessary, so maybe not.

Meanwhile, I continue to believe that having anti-virus software on a Mac actually does more harm than good. You slow down your machine and risk running into one of these false-positive disasters, all in the hopes of blocking viruses that don’t effect your computer, anyway.

I’m not saying that Mac viruses aren’t possible, or that Mac users aren’t dumb enough to fall prey to malware, particularly Trojan Horses. What I’m saying is that when that fateful day comes when a Mac virus makes the rounds through millions of computers all over the globe, McAfee software won’t be ready for it, anyway. And only common sense is going to protect you from a Trojan Horse.

> In the US, if you’ve been waiting for the Nexus One for Verizon Wireless’ network, head over to [http://phones.verizonwireless.com/htc/incredible](http://phones.verizonwireless.com/htc/incredible) to pre-order the Droid Incredible by HTC, a powerful new Android phone and a cousin of the Nexus One that is similarly feature-packed. It will be available in stores on April 29th. > > We are very pleased with the amazing pace of innovation and strength of the Android ecosystem and to be working with partners around the world to bring the Android experience to more people. So, for those of you keeping score: In the U.S. Nexus One, the huge innovation from Google, the phone that was going to change the way phones are sold by offering complete choice of carriers to its users, is now, four months after its release, still only available on T-Mobile and AT&T (and you need the specific version of the Nexus One for each). No word on Sprint. And now, according to this post from Google, the Verizon version has been cancelled entirely.

That’s right. Google is suggesting to Verizon users that they just get the Droid Incredible instead. Which makes sense, since the Incredible is a better phone anyway, but that’s the problem with Android. A better Android phone is never more than two months away, so there’s no way for anyone to sell any particular Android phone with any success.

It would be extremely difficult to botch the Nexus One debut any worse than Google did. My guess is that the Nexus One will fade into obscurity by next year, and Google will hope everyone forgets just how huge a FAIL this whole experiment was.

Clearly, Verizon wants to leverage all that money they’ve dumped into the Droid brand, and has no interest in supporting a phone that is Google-branded instead. That makes perfect sense. But it demonstrates just how foolish it was to release Nexus One so soon after the original Droid. Never mind poor Motorola, whose original Droid is already a relic thanks to HTC’s new Droid Incredible.

Do you see how having all these carriers and handset makers pitted against one another causes more problems than it solves? Pretty soon, many of them will figure out that the only company benefitting from Android is Google. And they’ll start looking for alternatives again.

The old-world Microsoft licensing model is dead. No one wants to be pushed around by a giant monopoly anymore.

More importantly, why is Google still getting a pass from the press on these obvious missteps? Just try and picture for a second if Apple were to announce tomorrow that the iPhone were coming to Verizon, and then in August announce that they weren’t going to do that release, after all. Can you even begin to imagine the barrage of negative press that would accompany that?

> ## the “of course” model of innovation diffusion > > People won’t buy a product if they can’t understand it immediately. They can’t understand it immediately if their worldview doesn’t already have a readymade place for it. And their worldview won’t have a readymade place for it, if they’ve never seen anything like it before. > > Steve expertly wields the powerful tool that is *the feeling of recognition.* > > That feeling tells us, *hey, I’ve been here before, and good things happened, and people were nice to me*. Recognition is a poor man’s wisdom. It helps people decide whether to buy. Without recognition, they won’t even entertain the question. > > So, because one Steve is worth a zillion other CEOs, Apple paves the way to the future by giving us devices we can understand today, in order to create more revolutionary (but still recognizable) devices tomorrow. > > Do you doubt that the iPod was laying the groundwork for the iPad all along? That final question is what I’ve been pondering all weekend. Way back when Apple dropped its best-selling iPod to date, the iPod mini, and launched the iPod nano as its replacement, most of us thought it was a bold, risky move that merely fed into Steve’s obsession with making iPods smaller. [Saturday Night Live even did a sketch about it. ](http://www.myvideo.de/watch/417313/IPod_Invisa)

But the real motivation there, it seems in hindsight, was not so much about having a smaller iPod, but to move Apple’s devices in general towards Flash storage, and more importantly, away from hard drive storage. Try to picture an iPhone with a portable hard drive, instead of Flash memory. Or even the iPad.

Flash RAM prices were far too high at the time to offer large capacities in consumer devices. The entire iPod nano’s existence, then, served as a tool for accelerating the drop of RAM prices over time. Apple took its best-selling product, and turned it into a driving force for future products. Talk about a risk.

Rather than continuing to sell what already worked, Apple made a drastic change that seemed completely unimportant to the average consumer at the time (retaining familiarity, as the above article suggests), but paved the way for the devices of the future.

The iPad would not be possible today at the current price point if it hadn’t been for the nano. And Apple was already thinking about the iPad that long ago.

If you think that’s easy, or that it’s commonplace in the business world to have that kind of foresight, you haven’t been to many design meetings at other companies. Trying to convince a CEO that your top-selling device needs to be dropped in order to prepare for the devices you want to sell in five years is next to impossible at most places. Most people say ‘if it ain’t broke…”

Skate to where the puck is going, indeed.

> We’ve come full circle: Google positions itself as the champion of “open web” (because it’s good for its own business), promotes HTML5 (because it’s *the* vehicle to get there) but comes across a formidable competitor in Apple and finds itself at a disadvantage. What to do? Why, let’s promote the very *un-open and proprietary Flash*, as a purely cynical competitive bludgeon against Apple. Exposing Google’s hypocrisy on a regular basis. Amazing that the mainstream tech press never seems to point these things out when it comes to Google.

Anyone who tries to pass off Adobe’s Flash as the open, standards-based choice loses all credibility, as far as I’m concerned.

“Don’t be evil, as long as it’s profitable,” indeed.