4 ms·

Simply start your own major smartphone platform to compete with the duopoly, duh. Easy as that.

supernova87a 6y ago
Maybe it tells you something about the market dynamics and difficulty of technology that there are only 2. And maybe that produces the margins it does. If it's not easy, maybe you should think about why then. And not be so quick to dictate how things should be otherwise.
- mulmen 6y ago
  To add on, only two remaining. Multiple massive corporations with essentially unlimited funding and desire failed in this space repeatedly, some with enormous head starts. The thought that someone can simply start another mobile platform is naive bordering on absurd. This is an established market that clearly can support only one or two participants. We have seen this movie.
  - josefx 6y ago
    > This is an established market that clearly can support only one or two participants. It helps that the Google Play license would kill the existing product lines of any of the large phone manufacturers that tried. As far as I am aware courts seem to generally agree that Googles license is hilariously anti competitive in nature.
    - mulmen 6y ago
      I should have appended "in the current regulatory climate."
- jariel 6y ago
  " maybe you should think about why then" It's 'not easy' because the current monopolists will crush any attempt to take their turf - which is the whole point.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    I think it's more complicated than that. It seems like a lot of markets -- maybe most -- go through consolidation, and the more the market is one whose players benefit from network effects -- like, say, incompatible computing platforms -- the more rapid this consolidation is. Look at the personal computing market: there were a lot of players in the late 1970s and early 80s, and nobody was an obvious winner. Yet by 1990, the IBM PC already had over 80% of the market, Apple was struggling, and other once-major players were on the verge of bankruptcy or had thrown in the towel and started making PC clones. And none of that happened because IBM was "crushing any attempt to take their turf". Frankly, I really didn't expect a repeat of that in the mobile space. It was clear to me in 2007 that the iPhone was going to be a big deal, but it wasn't clear to me that Android was going to take off the way it did, in no small part because I didn't expect everyone else to dramatically collapse in three years. One of the other players was Microsoft, for heaven's sake. Nokia was a market leader and had MeeGo almost ready to go (right? right?). Blackberry had bought QNX and were surely going to leverage that talent into a next-generation OS (right? right?). The market as it exists now is down to two players, but this is kind of the confounding factor here: neither Apple nor Google got to their position in the mobile phone market by "playing dirty." Apple got there because people keep buying iPhones; Google got there because just about everyone who isn't Apple went with Android. So supernova87a is, I suspect, fundamentally correct that we got to where we are now because of market dynamics. It's arguable that because the market now is down to two players -- and is orders of magnitude larger than it was a decade ago -- that there are antitrust concerns around app stores, although I think that's actually even more complicated.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Microsoft and Nokia were victims of their own internal politics. As former Nokia employee, the whole Symbian vs Linux was a big deal to what happened, hence why the first Linux tablets lacked any kind of phone capabilities, despite us in internal road shows about future devices providing that as feedback. The Symbian dev community, despite not being in love with Symbian C++, what spoiled everything was the continuous reboot in dev tools (Metrowerks with Perl scripts, 2 Eclipse based IDEs, Qt) and then came the burning memo telling them that the efforts to go through all those Symbian reboots were in vain, and it was time to start from scratch with .NET (Silverlight/XNA). Microsoft, for rebooting the platform multiple times, PocketPC/Windows CE into the constrained Silverlight/XNA of WP7, followed up by a complete reboot for WP 8, yet another one in WP 8.1 to align a bit more the platforms (UAP), followed by the UWP rewrite once more when Windows 10 came out. Ah and in the process they failed to uphold to their promises of which devices would get the updates for the new OS versions. Yet, despite all the dev and consumer anger in the WP eco-system regarding those decisions, they managed to slow and steady arrive to 10% market in Europe, which could have kept increasing if they were willing to bleed a bit more, while sorting out their politics. Meanwhile Windows slowly owns the tablet market, at least here in Europe, everyone that wants a tablet with detachable keyboard and isn't willing to pay Apple prices, goes either with 2-1 laptops or convertible ones, which with the ongoing Reunion project roadmap means devs are back with a Windows 7 tablet programming model alongside an improved COM for the ride (yet another reboot to add up to the previous ones). And this mostly because how much Google tries, most apps for Android tablets are just phone apps running on bigger screen, while Microsoft has learned to take advantage of their market share in laptops as the hardware turns into better tablets.
- nikitaga 6y ago
  Yeah it tells me something about market dynamics. About network effects and natural monopolies and high barriers to entry created by those effects. It is very natural, economically, that only a couple producers would win this particular market. The technology aspect of this is barely even relevant. If there was a market for 10 mobile operating systems, they would exist. They don't exist due to network effects making such systems DOA, not because it's technically impossible to create a good mobile OS. Simply put, no one wants or needs a new OS without a million apps for it. And no one wants an app store without a million apps in it. This is very obviously the kind of monopolistic market that the government should be regulating. Too bad they've gone soft on such stuff in recent decades.

Maybe it tells you something about the market dynamics and difficulty of technology that there are only 2. And maybe that produces the margins it does. If it's not easy, maybe you should think about why then. And not be so quick to dictate how things should be otherwise.

mulmen 6y ago
To add on, only two remaining. Multiple massive corporations with essentially unlimited funding and desire failed in this space repeatedly, some with enormous head starts. The thought that someone can simply start another mobile platform is naive bordering on absurd. This is an established market that clearly can support only one or two participants. We have seen this movie.
- josefx 6y ago
  > This is an established market that clearly can support only one or two participants. It helps that the Google Play license would kill the existing product lines of any of the large phone manufacturers that tried. As far as I am aware courts seem to generally agree that Googles license is hilariously anti competitive in nature.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    I should have appended "in the current regulatory climate."
jariel 6y ago
" maybe you should think about why then" It's 'not easy' because the current monopolists will crush any attempt to take their turf - which is the whole point.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  I think it's more complicated than that. It seems like a lot of markets -- maybe most -- go through consolidation, and the more the market is one whose players benefit from network effects -- like, say, incompatible computing platforms -- the more rapid this consolidation is. Look at the personal computing market: there were a lot of players in the late 1970s and early 80s, and nobody was an obvious winner. Yet by 1990, the IBM PC already had over 80% of the market, Apple was struggling, and other once-major players were on the verge of bankruptcy or had thrown in the towel and started making PC clones. And none of that happened because IBM was "crushing any attempt to take their turf". Frankly, I really didn't expect a repeat of that in the mobile space. It was clear to me in 2007 that the iPhone was going to be a big deal, but it wasn't clear to me that Android was going to take off the way it did, in no small part because I didn't expect everyone else to dramatically collapse in three years. One of the other players was Microsoft, for heaven's sake. Nokia was a market leader and had MeeGo almost ready to go (right? right?). Blackberry had bought QNX and were surely going to leverage that talent into a next-generation OS (right? right?). The market as it exists now is down to two players, but this is kind of the confounding factor here: neither Apple nor Google got to their position in the mobile phone market by "playing dirty." Apple got there because people keep buying iPhones; Google got there because just about everyone who isn't Apple went with Android. So supernova87a is, I suspect, fundamentally correct that we got to where we are now because of market dynamics. It's arguable that because the market now is down to two players -- and is orders of magnitude larger than it was a decade ago -- that there are antitrust concerns around app stores, although I think that's actually even more complicated.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Microsoft and Nokia were victims of their own internal politics. As former Nokia employee, the whole Symbian vs Linux was a big deal to what happened, hence why the first Linux tablets lacked any kind of phone capabilities, despite us in internal road shows about future devices providing that as feedback. The Symbian dev community, despite not being in love with Symbian C++, what spoiled everything was the continuous reboot in dev tools (Metrowerks with Perl scripts, 2 Eclipse based IDEs, Qt) and then came the burning memo telling them that the efforts to go through all those Symbian reboots were in vain, and it was time to start from scratch with .NET (Silverlight/XNA). Microsoft, for rebooting the platform multiple times, PocketPC/Windows CE into the constrained Silverlight/XNA of WP7, followed up by a complete reboot for WP 8, yet another one in WP 8.1 to align a bit more the platforms (UAP), followed by the UWP rewrite once more when Windows 10 came out. Ah and in the process they failed to uphold to their promises of which devices would get the updates for the new OS versions. Yet, despite all the dev and consumer anger in the WP eco-system regarding those decisions, they managed to slow and steady arrive to 10% market in Europe, which could have kept increasing if they were willing to bleed a bit more, while sorting out their politics. Meanwhile Windows slowly owns the tablet market, at least here in Europe, everyone that wants a tablet with detachable keyboard and isn't willing to pay Apple prices, goes either with 2-1 laptops or convertible ones, which with the ongoing Reunion project roadmap means devs are back with a Windows 7 tablet programming model alongside an improved COM for the ride (yet another reboot to add up to the previous ones). And this mostly because how much Google tries, most apps for Android tablets are just phone apps running on bigger screen, while Microsoft has learned to take advantage of their market share in laptops as the hardware turns into better tablets.
nikitaga 6y ago
Yeah it tells me something about market dynamics. About network effects and natural monopolies and high barriers to entry created by those effects. It is very natural, economically, that only a couple producers would win this particular market. The technology aspect of this is barely even relevant. If there was a market for 10 mobile operating systems, they would exist. They don't exist due to network effects making such systems DOA, not because it's technically impossible to create a good mobile OS. Simply put, no one wants or needs a new OS without a million apps for it. And no one wants an app store without a million apps in it. This is very obviously the kind of monopolistic market that the government should be regulating. Too bad they've gone soft on such stuff in recent decades.