The real thought here, I think, is that adoption drives hardware improvement -- only if you're selling a hojillion chips can you make them cheap, good, and prof

The real thought here, I think, is that adoption drives hardware improvement -- only if you're selling a hojillion chips can you make them cheap, good, and profitable. From this perspective, what you'd want to say is that large market share advantages are extremely defensible and can let you crush the little guys (which apple was through the 90's). But how do you get there in the first place? The analogy between android/iOS and windows/mac I think has to be well-taken, but most discussions (including this one) leave out the most important difference. Windows got to sell a hojillion units by being the best at selling to business. You buy multi-thousand-dollar machines for all your employees because you expect productivity increases; you don't worry too hard about whether they like the machines or not. The decision maker buys on specs and price if it's not just a salesforce versus salesforce game (a likely win for the open platform because there are more players behind it). The current generation of mobile, however, is a consumer phenomenon. Businesses aren't buying modern smartphones for their employees -- they're hooking the employees' phones into their networks. Adoption is not driven by purchasing managers but by consumers and therefore by user experience, consumer marketing, branding, etc. in addition to specs and price. This puts the open platform with the worse user experience for the average user at a big disadvantage, particularly if the price differential isn't that large in absolute dollars, which it isn't by comparison with the computers of the 90's (the gap between comparably-specced PC's and mac's being enough to buy multiple smartphones). I don't know that it makes sense to think of any platform being as strong a winner as windows was; the very presence in the market of a company eager to use an operating system as a loss leader means that android will probably never shrink as small as apple did. However, Apple's advantages in design and branding play to the challenges of the mobile market in a way that they simply didn't for PCs. To this, add the scale advantage Apple currently enjoys (as monopsony buyer of flash memory and LCD's) that locks in big profits that competitors can't touch and it seems quite clear which way the playing field is tilted. tl;dr: windows won by owning the business market; mobile plays to apple's strengths in a way PC's never have.