> Why does everybody aim for total market dominance? Is is not enough anymore to be just profitable? Network effects are very helpful. Also remember to distin

> Why does everybody aim for total market dominance? Is is not enough anymore to be just profitable? Network effects are very helpful. Also remember to distinguish fixed costs from variable costs. The development effort is pretty much a fixed cost, whether you sell few or many. Each additional product sold reduces the fixed costs per device. Generally the more you sell, the cheaper you can make the product, the more profitable you can be, the better deals you can negotiate etc. And then the bigger customer base you have, the easier it is to continue to do well financially. There are more opportunities for a longer term sustainable business. > If I look at my Android phone, there are maybe 5 external apps that I use regularly ... The power of defaults! What you are also implying is that the apps that came with the Android phone are all you need, plus those 5 external ones. This gives great power to the provider of the builtin/default ones. > If developers don't want to port their apps, Microsoft is in a position to just f'ing do it themselves if they really wanted. Not really. Microsoft doesn't have the source to the apps, would have to stick to rules about trademarks (eg calling an app "Google Search" would be problematic), would have to develop against public APIs and their requirements, would have to maintain the apps, and a heck of a lot of other stuff. For example see http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/09/microsoft-re-releases-its-youtube-app-for-windows-phone/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/09/microsoft-re-releases-its-y... An aside/anecdote was a developer colleague who worked at a company that made a music player. They were paid $100k by Microsoft to port to Windows Phone in its earlier days. The Microsoft app review team then rejected the resulting app, because it kept running as music players need to, and Microsoft didn't have any rules yet about apps that needed to keep running in the background. It did eventually get sorted out, but still rather amusing.