esr writes in his latest Smartphone Wars[1] installment: "WebOS, we hardly knew ye [...] WebOS has looked terminal to us for a long time. [...] WebOS didn’t su

esr writes in his latest Smartphone Wars[1] installment: "WebOS, we hardly knew ye [...] WebOS has looked terminal to us for a long time. [...] WebOS didn’t suck, technically speaking. It was certainly better constructed than the turd-with-frosting that is WP7. [...] The cool thing about WebOS was that its architecture was beautiful. [...] WebOS’s problem was that the coolness stopped there. The source was closed, with all the usual bad effects including higher defect rates and lower developer interest. [...] Some sort of larger shakeout seems to be going on. [...] RIM is next to the wall, probably. WP7 should already have been terminated for extreme failure (Samsung’s own-brand Bada OS is actually outselling it[2]) [...] It might be that Android, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM are now entering scorpions-in-a-bottle time. [...] There can be only one... major incumbent. A whale, with a minnow or two in its shadow. Maybe Android should invert the Twitter fail whale into a success cetacean?" [1] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3611 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3611 [2] http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Samsungs-Bada-outsells-Windows-Phone-in-Q2/1313075608 http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Samsungs-Bada-outs...