14 ms·

But the iPhone and iPad aren't priced at a premium. Anyway, it's a mistake pit Google against Apple. The real battle will be between Google and Microsoft for

But the iPhone and iPad aren't priced at a premium. Anyway, it's a mistake pit Google against Apple. The real battle will be between Google and Microsoft for the exact same hardware manufacturers and sales channels. (Meanwhile, you can buy an iPad from an Apple Store or from Walmart without any carrier involvement). Google hasn't managed the fragmentation problem very well, they haven't done enough to control the quality the Android OS between carriers and manufacturers, and they've utterly mismanaged the Android Market. I'm no fan of Microsoft or WinMo 7, but I expect Microsoft to do a much better job at addressing all of those issues. Microsoft can also leverage their Zune desktop software. And Microsoft's development tools are generally very popular with developers. I've done some work with WPF and I found it very impressive and I would expect their Phone SDK to be of similar quality. On the other hand, even though I generally like Java I'm finding the move from iPhone development to Android development to be a depressing step backwards both in terms of the dev tools and especially the SDK. Then again, it is Microsoft we're talking about. It may take them another 3 or 6 years to get it right.

naner 16y ago
And Microsoft's development tools are generally very popular with developers. Yes, very popular with .NET developers. That's the problem with Microsoft, everything is coupled together and isolated from anything non-Microsoft. You're usually either a .NET developer or an everything-else developer. Everyone else has free development tools/environments. Everyone else has vibrant online communities. Everyone else shares and collaborates with open source projects (strategically at least).
- akho 16y ago
  StackOverflow is somewhat .NET-biased, and it’s probably the most vibrant online community available. Mono provides a free development tool/environment built around skills easily transferred to .NET. Microsoft even occasionally collaborates with Mono. Also, “everything is coupled together” occasionally becomes a feature. However, what do I know — I haven’t ever used a Microsoft OS on a computer I control. .NET seems nice, though.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    As a CS student, I'm a bit surprised that our curriculum contains no .NET whatsoever. We learn Java, C and C++ (both with gcc), Python, Perl, Bash scripting and ARM assembly, plus others depending on electives. While some of the lab computers run XP, all of our work has to be platform-independent. We work in *nix, and most of the professors use MBPs. It seems to me that the program really might be selling some of our students short by not covering something as huge as .NET, but I'm not complaining.
    - MrScruff 16y ago
      I'm sure you've been told this before but it really matters very little what language you are taught in your degree. During the course of your career you'll learn many languages and APIs. It's the principles of sound software engineering that will stand you in good stead.
      - spacemanaki 16y ago
        That being said... I resent my school using (almost) only Java for its curriculum. When I started learning JavaScript, Scheme, and Common Lisp this past year and discovered languages with first class functions and closures, my feelings of resentment only grew.
    - jallmann 16y ago
      No. The .NET you have to "learn" is just a set of class libraries and interfaces, the gist of which you will get in a weekend hacking together your first C# project. Unix is the platform to teach in CS , if you should even teach towards a platform at all. Not only because *nix common in industry, but its set of small and reusable tools is well suited to the software engineering philosophy. My CS department had a course in .NET. It also had a course in XML. Why anyone would take those is baffling. Also, if all you're extracting from your CS classes are new languages to pad your resume with, then you are missing the forest for the trees.
- _delirium 16y ago
  Apple is fairly similar on that front. If you want to develop iPhone apps, you have to buy into the whole stack: XCode on OS X on a Mac. (Well, technically it's possible to target the iPhone via other methods, but they're not easy or supported, or in some cases even legal.)
  - naner 16y ago
    Well... Microsoft is a little more weird. The company still freaks out over open source. And when they "officially" started endorsing some open source, it was in the context of their own open source licenses and their own open source hosting website. Then they try and develop web technology, Silverlight, that is better than Flash by technical standards but is so entrenched in Microsoft-land that hardly anyone wants to do anything with it. You can't author anything for it when using Apple and Linux doesn't even get a runtime (Mono doesn't count, can never be feature-complete). Apple doesn't seem quite the same. A lot of Apple developers are active in other developer communities. Microsoft developers seem to stick to Microsoft technologies. Perhaps this is because Microsoft has their own implementation of almost everything.
    - bad_user 16y ago
      > "Silverlight, that is better than Flash by technical standards but is so entrenched in Microsoft-land that hardly anyone wants to do anything with it" This is more to do with Flash being a defacto standard than anything else. I've been a Linux user since 10 years ago, and I haven't forgotten the piss-poor support of Adobe for Flash on Linux. Heck, they finally decided to start porting Flash to Linux because of competition with Silverlight. > "Mono doesn't count, can never be feature-complete" Of course Mono counts, and compared to open-source Flash clones, it is in a far better shape.
      - metageek 16y ago
        I've been a Linux user since 10 years ago, and I haven't forgotten the piss-poor support of Adobe for Flash on Linux. Hard to forget it when it won't go away. No 64-bit plugin, no accelerated video. (Their explanation that there are too many video acceleration APIs was pretty weak: if they adopted one, it would become the standard.)
orangecat 16y ago
Google hasn't managed the fragmentation problem very well, they haven't done enough to control the quality the Android OS between carriers and manufacturers, and they've utterly mismanaged the Android Market. All true, and still they've had great success. (I'm actually surprised, given how bad the Market is and how blatantly the carriers are screwing up the phones). Which just means they can do even better if they can address those obvious problems. On the other hand, even though I generally like Java I'm finding the move from iPhone development to Android development to be a depressing step backwards It was the opposite for me. Between getting rid of header files and manual memory management, and having the app run right away on my phone rather than futzing with certificates, I'm enjoying Android development much more.
- Locke1689 16y ago
  FYI, Windows 7 Phone uses the Microsoft .NET SDK so you can actually write in any .NET language. This is one of the few real reasons I would switch to Windows 7 Phone -- I would love to try programming a phone app in F#.
  - DougWebb 16y ago
    There is an effort to provide tools for Android development in a bunch of scripting languages. It's not ready for prime time yet and it wasn't clear to me how well you'll be able to access the libraries, but it's a promising alternative.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      Is this the one you had in mind? http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/
      - adambyrtek 16y ago
        ASE doesn't allow you to build fully featured applications, only simple scripts that can interact with the Android APIs. On the other hand Ruboto[1] looks very promising, it's a project that brings JRuby to Android application development. [1] http://ruboto.org/ http://ruboto.org/
jsnell 16y ago
You might well be right on the iPad, the $200 Android tablets mentioned in this blog post are probably total crap. But the iPhone is clearly priced at a premium, 20-30% more than the models with comparable hardware from other phone manufacturers. Note that I'm not complaining. Apple is free to price their goods however they want, and if they can price the iPhone at a massive premium and still sell tons, that's great for them. I'm sure other phone makers would love to have similar margins.
- riobard 16y ago
  I hate to say this, but it seems common to compare price based on the hardware alone. Good software and good design cost money too. A lot of money. You pay for the development, testing, and design of all the prototypes discarded before the one you get. Android phone vendors save a lot on the development of the system because Google and many others paid for it. And frankly, based on the make of the majority of Android phones, I don't think they spend as much as Apple on the design part either. That might explain the 20~30% "premium". You get what you paid for.
  - jsnell 16y ago
    I don't understand why you're putting scare-quotes around '"premium"'. Apple do a lot of things very well, have a great brand, and unlike most of their competitors haven't been totally commoditized. That allows them to sell the iPhone and Macs at a high premium compared to the competitors. As a result they are ridiculously profitable while most other phone and PC manufacturers range from making a loss to making a modest profit. (And actually Apple spends stunningly little on R&D compared to it's peers. There was a rather nice graph about this that I can't find, but e.g. Microsoft and Nokia spend an order of magnitude more on R&D than Apple does, while seemingly getting just a fraction of the results.)
    - riobard 16y ago
      I put the quotes around premium 'cause I don't really feel Apple charges unfairly for its products. The software and design is worth every penny of that extra 20%~30%. My take on the R&D thing: Yes Apple is likely to be the largest tech company to spend least on R&D, but they have a much smaller range of products and market share to recover that cost. Also I was talking about the smart phone for that. Nokia and Microsoft don't make Android phones. They cannot take the free ride on Google.
lawfulfalafel 16y ago
A lot of companies have to pay an 'Android tax' to Microsoft in order to prevent litigation. HTC paid Microsoft off in order to not be sued[1], Samsung and LG cut a deal that included exchanging patents[2][3], and Motorola decided to fight[4] (my simplifications are not perfect). I am saying all this to say that it's unfair to say that there is a "battle will be between Google and Microsoft for the exact same hardware manufacturers and sales channels" when Microsoft is blackmailing everyone and profits from either outcome. I mean Google ain't a morally perfect company (I still believe based on what I know that the Verizon deal is unfair) but to my knowledge they seem to be quite the David in this fight. [1] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/apr10/04-27mshtcpr.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/apr10/04-27msh... [2] http://news.cnet.com/2100-1014_3-6177381.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&subj=news http://news.cnet.com/2100-1014_3-6177381.html?part=rss&t... [3] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/lg-microsoft-link-on-licences/story-e6frgamo-1111113700475 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/lg-microsoft-l... [4] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703859204575526200991561476.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870385920457552...
- ESchmidtSeesYou 16y ago
  If you want to sell a Windows Phone 7 handset, you have to pay Microsoft. If you want to sell an Android handset... you have to pay Microsoft. They're pretty direct about their legal strategy.
webwright 16y ago
"But the iPhone and iPad aren't priced at a premium." I believe that AT&T subsidizes the hell out of the iPhone (pays Apple $400 per phone sold), which the do for the privilege of exclusivity, among other reasons. When/if that exclusivity dies, we'll see if carriers will pony up. The alternative is more expensive iPhones or reduced margins (will Apple be willing to accept the latter?).
- potatolicious 16y ago
  > "I believe that AT&T subsidizes the hell out of the iPhone" No more than any other device. By all reports, the iPhone is not significantly more expensive to build than comparable smartphones, and in fact if you look at similar smartphones, both subsidized contract prices and unsubsidized prices are very similar to the iPhone as well. Android is going to open the market for cheaper, low-end smartphones, that's for certain - but comparably equipped smartphones, whether they be Nokia, Android, or WinMo7, are all in the same general price point.
  - jsnell 16y ago
    If I look at comparable high end smartphones, they are significantly cheaper than the iPhone whether subsidized or not. For example from Switzerland: Locked,subsidized iPhone 4 16GB: 199 CHF + two year contract at 55 CHF / month Locked,subsidized Galaxy S: 1 CHF + two year contract at 55 CHF /month, but with the monthly fee waived for 3 months (so basically 350 CHF cheaper) Unlocked, unsubsidized iPhone 4 16GB: 769 CHF Unlocked, unsubsidized Nokia N8: 519 CHF
    - tomerico 16y ago
      You display partial data. I did a quick google search and Samsung Galaxy S 16GB cost 799 CHF on swisscom http://swisscomonlineshop.sso.bluewin.ch/onlineshop/Pages/ProductDetail/ProductDetail.aspx?cat=OS_Mobilkommunikation&subcat=OS_Mobiles_Internet&drilldown=3&id=000000000010023005&lang=EN http://swisscomonlineshop.sso.bluewin.ch/onlineshop/Pages/Pr...
ZeroGravitas 16y ago
The iPhone is priced at a premium. At best you could argue (like the standard Windows vs Apple arguments) that if you start with the iPhone and then try to match most of its features then you'll end up paying the same. More likely you're still paying up to a third more, though this may be mostly hidden by US carrier billing practices. Of course if you start with a cheap Android phone like the ZTE Blade then you'll simply not be able to match it on price. Nor if you choose an Android phone with a 5" screen or hardware keyboard or HDMI out will you be able to match it on features. Note the contradiction between the two common claims that a) the iPhone isn't more expensive than alternatives and b) Android is only gaining marketshare because of Buy-One-Get-One-Free deals.
billmcneale 16y ago
Actually, the real battle will be between Apple and Microsoft for spots #3 and #4 in the mobile market, as explained here: http://beust.com/weblog/2010/05/22/more-on-android-and-the-iphone-2/ http://beust.com/weblog/2010/05/22/more-on-android-and-the-i... Android is already #2 and poised to become #1 in the next three years. Apple and Microsoft will soon not even be in the same league.
- evgen 16y ago
  They will definitely lag in number of handsets, but will also completely destroy the Android players in terms of profit. If you consider the ecosystem as a whole, I am betting that Microsoft will also knock Android down into third-place in terms of third-party developer profit as well.
  - billmcneale 16y ago
    The profit argument stopped being true a few days ago, when Google announced their earnings including the mobile break down.
    - evgen 16y ago
      Google does not profit from Android, they profit through mobile advertising which has very little to do with a specific phone OS. The profit argument simply points out that the people who are producing Android phones have the lowest profit/handset in the industry and having a "sell more regardless of the low profit levels" strategy such as what Nokia used for the past decade is a recipe for disaster.
bad_user 16y ago
This is what I call a typical product launch by Microsoft: hype with lots of magic dust that is going to fix everyone's problems. Until you see those WinMo 7 phones in the wild, I would withhold judgment if I were you. And you know what, it is also typically of Microsoft to fuck WinMo 6.x users and developers with something totally incompatible and no upgrade path.

naner 16y ago

And Microsoft's development tools are generally very popular with developers. Yes, very popular with .NET developers. That's the problem with Microsoft, everything is coupled together and isolated from anything non-Microsoft. You're usually either a .NET developer or an everything-else developer. Everyone else has free development tools/environments. Everyone else has vibrant online communities. Everyone else shares and collaborates with open source projects (strategically at least).

akho 16y ago
StackOverflow is somewhat .NET-biased, and it’s probably the most vibrant online community available. Mono provides a free development tool/environment built around skills easily transferred to .NET. Microsoft even occasionally collaborates with Mono. Also, “everything is coupled together” occasionally becomes a feature. However, what do I know — I haven’t ever used a Microsoft OS on a computer I control. .NET seems nice, though.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  As a CS student, I'm a bit surprised that our curriculum contains no .NET whatsoever. We learn Java, C and C++ (both with gcc), Python, Perl, Bash scripting and ARM assembly, plus others depending on electives. While some of the lab computers run XP, all of our work has to be platform-independent. We work in *nix, and most of the professors use MBPs. It seems to me that the program really might be selling some of our students short by not covering something as huge as .NET, but I'm not complaining.
  - MrScruff 16y ago
    I'm sure you've been told this before but it really matters very little what language you are taught in your degree. During the course of your career you'll learn many languages and APIs. It's the principles of sound software engineering that will stand you in good stead.
    - spacemanaki 16y ago
      That being said... I resent my school using (almost) only Java for its curriculum. When I started learning JavaScript, Scheme, and Common Lisp this past year and discovered languages with first class functions and closures, my feelings of resentment only grew.
  - jallmann 16y ago
    No. The .NET you have to "learn" is just a set of class libraries and interfaces, the gist of which you will get in a weekend hacking together your first C# project. Unix is the platform to teach in CS , if you should even teach towards a platform at all. Not only because *nix common in industry, but its set of small and reusable tools is well suited to the software engineering philosophy. My CS department had a course in .NET. It also had a course in XML. Why anyone would take those is baffling. Also, if all you're extracting from your CS classes are new languages to pad your resume with, then you are missing the forest for the trees.
_delirium 16y ago
Apple is fairly similar on that front. If you want to develop iPhone apps, you have to buy into the whole stack: XCode on OS X on a Mac. (Well, technically it's possible to target the iPhone via other methods, but they're not easy or supported, or in some cases even legal.)
- naner 16y ago
  Well... Microsoft is a little more weird. The company still freaks out over open source. And when they "officially" started endorsing some open source, it was in the context of their own open source licenses and their own open source hosting website. Then they try and develop web technology, Silverlight, that is better than Flash by technical standards but is so entrenched in Microsoft-land that hardly anyone wants to do anything with it. You can't author anything for it when using Apple and Linux doesn't even get a runtime (Mono doesn't count, can never be feature-complete). Apple doesn't seem quite the same. A lot of Apple developers are active in other developer communities. Microsoft developers seem to stick to Microsoft technologies. Perhaps this is because Microsoft has their own implementation of almost everything.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    > "Silverlight, that is better than Flash by technical standards but is so entrenched in Microsoft-land that hardly anyone wants to do anything with it" This is more to do with Flash being a defacto standard than anything else. I've been a Linux user since 10 years ago, and I haven't forgotten the piss-poor support of Adobe for Flash on Linux. Heck, they finally decided to start porting Flash to Linux because of competition with Silverlight. > "Mono doesn't count, can never be feature-complete" Of course Mono counts, and compared to open-source Flash clones, it is in a far better shape.
    - metageek 16y ago
      I've been a Linux user since 10 years ago, and I haven't forgotten the piss-poor support of Adobe for Flash on Linux. Hard to forget it when it won't go away. No 64-bit plugin, no accelerated video. (Their explanation that there are too many video acceleration APIs was pretty weak: if they adopted one, it would become the standard.)

orangecat 16y ago

Google hasn't managed the fragmentation problem very well, they haven't done enough to control the quality the Android OS between carriers and manufacturers, and they've utterly mismanaged the Android Market. All true, and still they've had great success. (I'm actually surprised, given how bad the Market is and how blatantly the carriers are screwing up the phones). Which just means they can do even better if they can address those obvious problems. On the other hand, even though I generally like Java I'm finding the move from iPhone development to Android development to be a depressing step backwards It was the opposite for me. Between getting rid of header files and manual memory management, and having the app run right away on my phone rather than futzing with certificates, I'm enjoying Android development much more.

Locke1689 16y ago
FYI, Windows 7 Phone uses the Microsoft .NET SDK so you can actually write in any .NET language. This is one of the few real reasons I would switch to Windows 7 Phone -- I would love to try programming a phone app in F#.
- DougWebb 16y ago
  There is an effort to provide tools for Android development in a bunch of scripting languages. It's not ready for prime time yet and it wasn't clear to me how well you'll be able to access the libraries, but it's a promising alternative.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Is this the one you had in mind? http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/
    - adambyrtek 16y ago
      ASE doesn't allow you to build fully featured applications, only simple scripts that can interact with the Android APIs. On the other hand Ruboto[1] looks very promising, it's a project that brings JRuby to Android application development. [1] http://ruboto.org/ http://ruboto.org/

jsnell 16y ago

You might well be right on the iPad, the $200 Android tablets mentioned in this blog post are probably total crap. But the iPhone is clearly priced at a premium, 20-30% more than the models with comparable hardware from other phone manufacturers. Note that I'm not complaining. Apple is free to price their goods however they want, and if they can price the iPhone at a massive premium and still sell tons, that's great for them. I'm sure other phone makers would love to have similar margins.

riobard 16y ago
I hate to say this, but it seems common to compare price based on the hardware alone. Good software and good design cost money too. A lot of money. You pay for the development, testing, and design of all the prototypes discarded before the one you get. Android phone vendors save a lot on the development of the system because Google and many others paid for it. And frankly, based on the make of the majority of Android phones, I don't think they spend as much as Apple on the design part either. That might explain the 20~30% "premium". You get what you paid for.
- jsnell 16y ago
  I don't understand why you're putting scare-quotes around '"premium"'. Apple do a lot of things very well, have a great brand, and unlike most of their competitors haven't been totally commoditized. That allows them to sell the iPhone and Macs at a high premium compared to the competitors. As a result they are ridiculously profitable while most other phone and PC manufacturers range from making a loss to making a modest profit. (And actually Apple spends stunningly little on R&D compared to it's peers. There was a rather nice graph about this that I can't find, but e.g. Microsoft and Nokia spend an order of magnitude more on R&D than Apple does, while seemingly getting just a fraction of the results.)
  - riobard 16y ago
    I put the quotes around premium 'cause I don't really feel Apple charges unfairly for its products. The software and design is worth every penny of that extra 20%~30%. My take on the R&D thing: Yes Apple is likely to be the largest tech company to spend least on R&D, but they have a much smaller range of products and market share to recover that cost. Also I was talking about the smart phone for that. Nokia and Microsoft don't make Android phones. They cannot take the free ride on Google.

lawfulfalafel 16y ago

A lot of companies have to pay an 'Android tax' to Microsoft in order to prevent litigation. HTC paid Microsoft off in order to not be sued[1], Samsung and LG cut a deal that included exchanging patents[2][3], and Motorola decided to fight[4] (my simplifications are not perfect). I am saying all this to say that it's unfair to say that there is a "battle will be between Google and Microsoft for the exact same hardware manufacturers and sales channels" when Microsoft is blackmailing everyone and profits from either outcome. I mean Google ain't a morally perfect company (I still believe based on what I know that the Verizon deal is unfair) but to my knowledge they seem to be quite the David in this fight. [1] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/apr10/04-27mshtcpr.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/apr10/04-27msh... [2] http://news.cnet.com/2100-1014_3-6177381.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&subj=news http://news.cnet.com/2100-1014_3-6177381.html?part=rss&t... [3] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/lg-microsoft-link-on-licences/story-e6frgamo-1111113700475 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/lg-microsoft-l... [4] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703859204575526200991561476.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870385920457552...

ESchmidtSeesYou 16y ago
If you want to sell a Windows Phone 7 handset, you have to pay Microsoft. If you want to sell an Android handset... you have to pay Microsoft. They're pretty direct about their legal strategy.

webwright 16y ago

"But the iPhone and iPad aren't priced at a premium." I believe that AT&T subsidizes the hell out of the iPhone (pays Apple $400 per phone sold), which the do for the privilege of exclusivity, among other reasons. When/if that exclusivity dies, we'll see if carriers will pony up. The alternative is more expensive iPhones or reduced margins (will Apple be willing to accept the latter?).

potatolicious 16y ago
> "I believe that AT&T subsidizes the hell out of the iPhone" No more than any other device. By all reports, the iPhone is not significantly more expensive to build than comparable smartphones, and in fact if you look at similar smartphones, both subsidized contract prices and unsubsidized prices are very similar to the iPhone as well. Android is going to open the market for cheaper, low-end smartphones, that's for certain - but comparably equipped smartphones, whether they be Nokia, Android, or WinMo7, are all in the same general price point.
- jsnell 16y ago
  If I look at comparable high end smartphones, they are significantly cheaper than the iPhone whether subsidized or not. For example from Switzerland: Locked,subsidized iPhone 4 16GB: 199 CHF + two year contract at 55 CHF / month Locked,subsidized Galaxy S: 1 CHF + two year contract at 55 CHF /month, but with the monthly fee waived for 3 months (so basically 350 CHF cheaper) Unlocked, unsubsidized iPhone 4 16GB: 769 CHF Unlocked, unsubsidized Nokia N8: 519 CHF
  - tomerico 16y ago
    You display partial data. I did a quick google search and Samsung Galaxy S 16GB cost 799 CHF on swisscom http://swisscomonlineshop.sso.bluewin.ch/onlineshop/Pages/ProductDetail/ProductDetail.aspx?cat=OS_Mobilkommunikation&subcat=OS_Mobiles_Internet&drilldown=3&id=000000000010023005&lang=EN http://swisscomonlineshop.sso.bluewin.ch/onlineshop/Pages/Pr...

ZeroGravitas 16y ago

The iPhone is priced at a premium. At best you could argue (like the standard Windows vs Apple arguments) that if you start with the iPhone and then try to match most of its features then you'll end up paying the same. More likely you're still paying up to a third more, though this may be mostly hidden by US carrier billing practices. Of course if you start with a cheap Android phone like the ZTE Blade then you'll simply not be able to match it on price. Nor if you choose an Android phone with a 5" screen or hardware keyboard or HDMI out will you be able to match it on features. Note the contradiction between the two common claims that a) the iPhone isn't more expensive than alternatives and b) Android is only gaining marketshare because of Buy-One-Get-One-Free deals.

billmcneale 16y ago

Actually, the real battle will be between Apple and Microsoft for spots #3 and #4 in the mobile market, as explained here: http://beust.com/weblog/2010/05/22/more-on-android-and-the-iphone-2/ http://beust.com/weblog/2010/05/22/more-on-android-and-the-i... Android is already #2 and poised to become #1 in the next three years. Apple and Microsoft will soon not even be in the same league.

evgen 16y ago
They will definitely lag in number of handsets, but will also completely destroy the Android players in terms of profit. If you consider the ecosystem as a whole, I am betting that Microsoft will also knock Android down into third-place in terms of third-party developer profit as well.
- billmcneale 16y ago
  The profit argument stopped being true a few days ago, when Google announced their earnings including the mobile break down.
  - evgen 16y ago
    Google does not profit from Android, they profit through mobile advertising which has very little to do with a specific phone OS. The profit argument simply points out that the people who are producing Android phones have the lowest profit/handset in the industry and having a "sell more regardless of the low profit levels" strategy such as what Nokia used for the past decade is a recipe for disaster.

bad_user 16y ago

This is what I call a typical product launch by Microsoft: hype with lots of magic dust that is going to fix everyone's problems. Until you see those WinMo 7 phones in the wild, I would withhold judgment if I were you. And you know what, it is also typically of Microsoft to fuck WinMo 6.x users and developers with something totally incompatible and no upgrade path.