18 ms·

On the Duopoly of Mobile

93 points by zdw 5y ago

ramesh31 5y ago
Imagine a world where Ballmer wasn't blinded by the desktop and enterprise market during the 2000s, and Windows Phone actually became a thing, and we had true competition among flagship phones today. Imagine a Surface Pro phone with modern specs that could sideload any x86 application. One can dream.
- SemanticStrengh 5y ago
  Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner
  - ramesh31 5y ago
    >Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner I think this is what never made sense to me about the failure of Windows Phone. They have a store. They have an operating system. They have an unbelievably extensive list of hardware partners with decades of manufacturing experience. They have some of the best engineers in the world. And yet, they ceded the single largest consumer industry to Google and Apple. The only explanation is poor leadership.
    - zamadatix 5y ago
      Windows phone had to introduce a store, operating system, and new hardware partners. The store was launched in tandem with Windows Phone and not added to the Desktop version until 2 years later. The OS and existing software base they had was irrelevant for small touch screens. The hardware partners they had weren't relevant to the mobile space and they weren't doing enough hardware development themselves to just rely on the in-staff hardware folks they had. Eventually they tried all these things but too late. They tried rebuilding the OS to be for more than just desktops, they tried rebuilding app platforms to not be platform specific, they tried rebuilding the interface to not be use type specific. It lead to a lot of angst due to the churn and a failure in the mobile space as their competitors already had working alternatives to all of these before they even launched. Poor leadership for sure but in waiting through all the 2000s and letting other's fill the space not because they already had everything made for them and let it fall apart. Xbox is one area that has seemed to really pan out for them which got all of these changes over time but again they launched that in the early 2000s not the early 2010s.
    - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      Windows Phone came out at a time when smartphones were still lifestyle products. Apple was the king of the hill in that respect and Google was still perceived as a pretty cool company even if having an Android phone wasn't as showy as having an iPhone. Having a phone from Microsoft meant you were probably a corporate weenie who wore pleated khakis and spent their day in a cubicle. The quality of the phone and the OS didn't really play into the perception of it. It's interesting that the perception wasn't the same in other parts of the world. Windows Phone seemed to be a premium product in Argentina. Think it had good acceptance in parts of Europe too, likely due to the Nokia versions. Perhaps trying to conquer the world except North America could have been a viable strategy but that's hard to really know and given the influence of the North American market on global culture, it might not have worked.
      - scarface74 5y ago
        Android didn’t succeed because anyone thought Google was cool. Android succeeded because it was ubiquitous when Apple was only available on AT&T and because Androids phones were cheaper.
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      I still think the largest balkanization factor in the current duopoly was the cellphone carriers. They have to support the phones they sell. They want as few variables in their support matrix. QED: three options is too many. Windows Phone had several major opportunity positions where they had all the software the needed and all the hardware they needed to make a statement and then: cellphone carriers simply refused to sell SIM cards to them. For pretty much the entire lifespan of Windows Phone it generally only had one of two major US carriers reluctantly shipping its flagship and the other supposedly "angry" at Microsoft and refusing to even allow it SIM cards on its network, with flip flopping which one was which between different "flagship" phones. How does any product survive in an ecosystem that harsh?
      - blep_ 5y ago
        I still find it bizarre that phone carriers sell phones. This shouldn't be an issue, in much the same way "Comcast only supports Dell and Lenovo laptops" would be incredibly weird.
        selectodude 5y ago
        But Comcast does only support Comcast modems. They’ll give you access but if you call with a question they’ll tell you tough shit and blame your hardware.
        blep_ 5y ago
        That hasn't been my experience, in lots of years of having to call them and make them fix dumb things. Once you get past the "no, I am quite sure there is no wifi interference on this cat5e cable" bit of the Generic Support Script, they do seem to be capable of understanding where the problem could plausibly be. (Ability to do anything about it varies.) They even helpfully provide a compatibility list: https://www.xfinity.com/support/devices/#unauth https://www.xfinity.com/support/devices/#unauth
        WorldMaker 5y ago
        Well, it's not just selling phones that is the issue but selling SIM cards. That's closer to the "Comcast only supports cable modems with Mac addresses they've identified and Command & Control functionality they need" analogy. (Which are things that cable modems support. Cable company operators can force certain cable modem operations similar to the way SIM cards support such things.) But also, it really isn't all that bizarre, it's got long precedent: For most of a century all phones were leased and the phone company controlled every bit of hardware on the network. That's not even the distant past, that's still in living memory, my parents grew up in households with leased phones. It took major anti-trust/monopoly breakup work to change that. So far the "use whatever phone you want" is the anomaly in the history of phone networks. (Cable companies too; most of their history all of their equipment was only leased and the era of being able to buy your own set top boxes and/or cable modems is a relatively brief anomaly versus the longer history of those networks.) The US is back down to only two/three major cell carriers (no matter how many "brands" you see; so many of them are just resellers), depending on how you want to count them (by network compatibility: two; by parent company: three). It may be time to trust-bust again.
  - KoftaBob 5y ago
    Between their introduction of Surface phones like the Duo, and their Microsoft Launcher, it seems like they're aiming for that down the road.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    What would be the point of Microsoft failing with Android in the same ways that Amazon and Samsung have already failed here? (Admittedly, I still don't se a lot of the point in Microsoft running Chromium Edge other than sadness and defeat. I use Chromium Edge on my work machine because they block Firefox and I dislike Chrome and Chromium Edge is such a sad shell of what Edge once was.)
    - SemanticStrengh 5y ago
      The point you're missing is that Microsoft is actively improving chromium
      - WorldMaker 5y ago
        I don't think I'm "missing" that point, but I do think you are missing mine: Amazon has tried to improve the Android ecosystem since day one, on the taking things at face value that Android was supposed to be an open platform for innovation, and instead has failed in just about every possible way. More than any other company, Amazon continues to prove that you cannot improve Android without Google's rubber stamp and that no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. Amazon's App Store is still the next biggest Android App Store after Google's and it can barely be listed as an "Also Ran" on the scorecard way below Google's numbers. Samsung similarly has spend nearly as much effort trying to improve Android and seen all sorts of failures. They've proved that few care about AOSP hardware improvements if it doesn't have Google's rubber stamp. They've proved in their own attempts no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. They've proved that you can't use AOSP certified hardware to bypass the cellphone carriers' extreme aversion to a Third option in the ecosystem and continue to fail at trying to bring Tizen phones to market (because the cell carriers don't care about AOSP, they care about "Android" TM, Google Style). What kind of "active improvement" can Microsoft bring to Android that Amazon and Samsung haven't already tried and failed at? What would be any sort of point in Microsoft investing in AOSP-based products when they have no easier time of selling them through today's cell carriers than they had with a proven Kernel and software stack that they own entirely? Especially without Google's complete consent and access to "Play Services" and the Google App Store moat, what can Microsoft possibly offer in Android that they couldn't better offer in "Windows Phone 11" that wouldn't also see the same extraordinary bad luck/worse market conditions than Windows Phone <= 10? (ETA: Especially all that as opposed to by the time Edge switched to Chromium there were already a half-dozen other browsers using Chromium as their base and also Microsoft had already contributed multiple improvements to Chromium for years. There's no "success stories" in "Open Source" Android. There's very few people running de-Gooogled Android successfully and no one has been able to market one successfully in stores. Microsoft themselves even contributed cash for some of the hard lessons of Cyanogen, Inc.'s funding for their eventual burnout.)
- somethoughts 5y ago
  Alternatively its interesting to imagine if instead of buying Nokia, Ballmer had instead doubled down more fully on cloud and bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in order to compete with Amazon AWS. Azure wouldn't be playing catch up now. It'd be challenging to try to sell handset manufacturers a WinMo license to compete with Apple (who makes money from HW and only more recently apps/subscription services) when Google was giving Android away for free to the same handset manufacturers. Even historically low margin Amazon gave up on the Fire phone. Additionally smartphones are a very visible consumer facing product and thus very visible from an anti-trust populism perspective. [1] Imagine Steve Ballmer testifying in congress like Zuckerberg, Cook, Dorsey, etc. - he would totally have bungled it. That said for consumers (rather than MSFT shareholders) a triopoly is for sure better than a duopoly. [1] Bill Gates thinks Windows Mobile would have beaten Android without Microsoft’s antitrust woes https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windows-mobile-android-competition-comments-microsoft-antitrust https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windo...
  - mr_toad 5y ago
    > bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in order to compete with Amazon AWS Microsoft’s (enterprise) customers weren’t ready for the cloud back then. They could have made a bid for the rest of the market, but I’m not sure the rest of the market wanted Microsoft.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    It would've been nice if Nokia had made another MeeGo smartphone after the N9 with the same sort of quality and usability.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    Standard disclaimer: I work for AWS all opinions on my own. I wouldn’t even say Azure is playing catch up to AWS. Azure is a strong second as far as marketshare. It also has a company behind it that knows enterprise and knows how to cater to it. Technologically, I can’t think of a single enterprise/startup need it couldn’t meet. MS’s developer tools have always been great. Yes, I realize that this is a “Nixon goes to China” post. Winning in mobile is a Pyrrhic victory for Google. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google only made a $27 billion profit on Android from 2010-2016. Google gives more than half that much per year to Apple to be the default search engine. Losing mobile was the best thing that could have happened to MS. It let them concentrate on being everywhere.
- danuker 5y ago
  > that could sideload any x86 application Too bad even desktop Windows is pushing for an App Store, gradually taking control away. I see where this is going. One reason I'd use Windows anymore is if I needed a dedicated GPU now with Windows-only drivers, for its computing efficiency. I wouldn't count on it being available long-term, as proprietary software eventually loses support and compatibility with the rest of the world. However, I don't need such special hardware, and I am perfectly happy with an integrated GPU. The heaviest video or massively-parallel tasks that I perform do not warrant a dedicated one, and I run them on my CPU. The other reason I'd use Windows is if a customer required me to do so (and of course I'd charge for it).
- guessbest 5y ago
  Windows Mobile was a thing and sideloading was the standard method of installing applications. WinCE also had handwriting recognition built in to every device running locally on a 200MHz arm processor with 16 Meg of RAM. Programming was possible on WinCE 6 using .NET 2 or 3.5 as well as C++. It was very performant on a device with 64 Megs of RAM. I guess the problem was that versions after WinCE 7 binaries were not compatible with the previous versions as well as Microsoft working solely through OEM's for releases rather than direct to consumer like Apple or Google's partnerships. There were lots of also rans in the industry such as Palm OS Cobalt (6.0) not being used by anyone and the Amazon Fire. Article from 2007 : > Of course, the discussion included the upcoming Apple iPhone and Mr. Ballmer had a few funny things to say about the device. >> It's sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get. https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60-vs-apple-iphone-at-3/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60...
  - ansible 5y ago
    What Ballmer and others missed (or blithely ignored) was the user experience with the iPhone vs other devices back in 2007. I had used various PDAs and mobile phones that had Internet access (of a sort) back then. Generally speaking, they had very tiny screens, a poor or nonexistent touchscreen, grossly underpowered processors with insufficient RAM, a cut-down network stack, and a crappy "browser". The best pre-iPhone experience (that I experienced) was the Moto Q, running Windows CE, which actually had WiFi and a almost tolerable text browser. I won't even talk about WAP and WML and how well all that worked. Compare that to the debut iPhone. Much larger capacitive touchscreen, smooth scrolling, pinch zoom / expand and more. You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Then you see all the effort put into the UI for the address book and other apps, and that all adds up to a user experience quite unlike anything else at the time. Revolutionary. A better experience than even the Windows CE handheld PDAs.
- loudmax 5y ago
  While we're at it, let's imagine a world where BeOS succeeded on the desktop. People without the technical inclination to run open source would have a choice of multiple competing commercial desktop environments rather than the current duopoly.
- jayd16 5y ago
  Why would it be x86? The OS isn't the holdout there. Android even supports x86.
- mrkramer 5y ago
  If that happened Android wouldn't exist but funny enough I trust Google more than Microsoft because Google at least pretends it cares with its once famous motto "Don't be evil".
  - scarface74 5y ago
    I trust a company a lot more whose business proposition is “I give them money and they give me stuff” than having an ad tech company’s operating system running on my phone.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  I think about this all the damn time. Imagine how much higher quality and stable the software stack would be if Microsoft took all of their lessons working with OEMs, chipset makers (GPUs, etc) for Windows and applied that to mobile. Instead we got an unengineered hot garbage driver interface that broke compatibility with every major android release. Absolute zero continuity across any low level APIs. Camera HAL, HAL 2, HAL 3! Isn’t the point of an abstraction layer to generalize functionality enough that you can grow into future devices and feature sets without a complete redesign of the interfaces? Google has zero vision of where mobile hardware was headed. Android design was built on Google promo culture not product design
- sifar 5y ago
  I like to imagine where the Meego based Nokia N9 was not burnt before launch by MS. It was far ahead of iphone/android. Things might have been different with it and it's successors.
SemanticStrengh 5y ago
I find it weird how perfectly stable the marketshare is https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide What are the odds.. Edit: actually Apple has gained marketshare in the last few years up to 29% then fallen to 27% and since stagnate to it. Despite being much much more APKs than Ipas (and the gradient likely increasing (any data ?), this doesn't seems to affect much markestshare. What the IOS market needs to fall is to miss some killer apps.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ink_13 5y ago
  If you increase the timescale, those numbers actually show that iOS has increased its market share by 10% since late 2018, which is also interesting.
  - fckgw 5y ago
    Not too long after the introduction of the iPhone SE and Apple keeping older models in their lineup to act as cheaper options to their yearly flagship phone. I'm sure a $399 SE has taken a chunk of Android's market share.
    - brewdad 5y ago
      I made the switch to Apple a year ago. I was tired of losing support 12-18 months after purchase and having my phones be practically unusable after 2 years. I have no interest in messing about with 3rd party OSes, I just want a phone that works. So far, I don't regret the change. Check back in a year to see if my battery still holds an all day charge.
      - selectodude 5y ago
        And a new battery is, what, $50?
      - 5y ago
pphysch 5y ago
In theory, the duopoly would be broken by manufacturers from other countries, but those products would just get banned in America.
- wombat-man 5y ago
  Why do you think this?
  - wyre 5y ago
    Because Hauwei is a competitor from another country but is banned in America
    - TulliusCicero 5y ago
      There's plenty of foreign phone manufacturers that sell in America. The idea that the US would ban them solely for being foreign is absurd.
    - tristor 5y ago
      Huawei is banned because they installed backdoors for a hostile foreign government in their devices and got caught. Not "just" because they're foreign. You can buy lots of Chinese made and foreign-made handsets in the US.
    - wombat-man 5y ago
      I mean you talk about manufacturers most android phones are not American these days.. We're talking about operating systems where the moat is a lot more about the app ecosystem
      - wyre 5y ago
        Ya, I don’t think the GP is correct either, but I’m sure some people see Hauwei/US relations as part of a great anti-China conspiracy.
- gilrain 5y ago
didibus 5y ago
I find the desktop duopoly even more annoying.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  It's more like a triopoly, isn't it? Linux is a reasonable choice for a consumer OS on laptops/desktops, at least for techies. Much more so than non-Android/iOS options on mobile. Especially with the work Valve has done to make Linux gaming more easily accessible, even releasing a Linux-based handheld console.
  - ajvs 5y ago
    Even non-techies really, as long as you have someone to do that first install since there's very few companies that offer Linux as the default OS for their hardware.
    - TulliusCicero 5y ago
      Eh, there's definitely issues where you do a search to see how to change/fix something and the most prominent results tell you to delve into the command line. As long as that's true, it's harder to recommend to non-techies imo.
- linguae 5y ago
  I disagree; I find it harder to migrate away from the iOS/Android duopoly than it is to migrate from the macOS/Windows duopoly. Because so much of modern desktop computing has migrated to the Web, I can use any operating system that supports a modern Web browser. LibreOffice has pretty good compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats for my needs at home; the only time I need Microsoft Office is at work, where I have access to Windows and macOS anyway. I could migrate to Linux or one of the BSDs full time at home if I wanted to (I currently use both FreeBSD and Windows 10), and the only thing I'd lose would be access to some DRM-protected media from iTunes I purchased years ago. However, if I were to give up my iPhone for a phone running GNU/Linux rather than Android, I'd have to give up many apps that I depend on, some of them with no Web versions. The smartphone situation today feels like how the Linux desktop was in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
Syonyk 5y ago
> Convergence was, if you go back and re-watch that video from the iPhone launch linked above, the big selling point of the iPhone. It is a media player, an internet browser, and a mobile phone all in one. And these days, it is a camera, a satellite navigation system, and a payment card too. So it is not enough to make a good phone, you have to make a good all-of-those-things. Or people have to be willing to go back to "Not all of this in one thing." And there are some nice benefits there. "Separate things" don't tend to data mine in the way that modern smartphones do, and I'm not too concerned about my not-at-all-networked camera submitting stuff upstream without me realizing it. I don't mind having music separate again, and I've been re-acquainting myself with internal navigational skills using paper maps and written directions to get around. It was nice when "all the things" were on a single device, and I've done that, but as I'm more and more opposed to "turning everything I do into extracted behavioral surplus," going back to separate things makes sense - and, realistically, it doesn't suck nearly as much as I expected it to. I now carry a phone that does calling and texting and... if I'm in the mood for pain, some bluetooth audio to speakers. It'll do calling via BT to the car if I bother to turn it on, and that's about as fancy as I normally get. Though anymore, I'm as likely to forget the phone as not when I go places. Photos are done with a pocket camera now, going back to that which I did for years. I take fewer photos, but it's fine, and it also means that working on projects I'm documenting, I don't have the distraction of the phone there. I have a camera, and it takes pictures. It's a different approach to life, more of a return to a 90s/early 2000s approach, but I've been quite happy with it, and find it a welcome change from "Everything in one device."
- linmob 5y ago
  The fun fact is, that when Purism write convergence, they‘re after what Canonicals' Ubuntu Touch (which sadly is not mentioned at all in the post) meant with Convergence and what Microsoft called "Continuum": Plugging your phone into a laptop dock or a monitor, keyboard + mouse and be able to use it as a "proper Computer". This requires "convergent apps" which change menus and sometimes even add features when they are run on a larger canvas of pixels. It's supposed to be even more in one device.
MBCook 5y ago
Is it really a surprise we ended up with a duopoly? Apple was the first modern smartphone with the iPhone and quickly got apps. That caused massive growth. Google was right there too, also had apps on a modern platform. They saw what people wanted. Everyone else was late to the party with their modern OSes. MS, Palm, BB. By the time they arrived Android and iOS already had a big lead. It’s hard to get a company to develop their apps for your 3rd+ place platform with almost no market share. So you have no apps. So things get worse. It was basically first mover advantage. Palm might have been OK but they were screwed over by Verizon. MS may have survived in 3rd but they kept rebooting their platform and breaking compatibility. Now the duopoly is too strong for anyone to break into without pouring insane amounts of cash in that will likely never return a profit. Until there is another big shift, I don’t see things changing. The current game is over, Google and Apple are too far ahead at it.
- vvanders 5y ago
  Everybody forgets about sidekick in this comparison. Had apps, email(push pop3!), IM, a functional browser was a killer device esp considering what hardware they were working with at the time.
- eptcyka 5y ago
  I have to argue that the original iPhone, as it was released, had no apps, the camera was not good and iOS had a laughable feature set. It quickly evolved to be much better than it's initial version, but I remember being rather upset that I had wait until iOS 3 or iOS 4 to get copy and paste support - a feature which I had on my Symbian phone for literal years. And my Symbian phone had multitasking for ages too. And it could film video. The iPhone had a handful of impressive features, but it was not all too useful for the first few iterations, aside from Safari - that was a game changer. Other manufacturers weren't late to the party, they had already gone home well drunk by the time Apple arrived. Their offerings hadn't advanced much for years, and it took years for incumbents to realize they need to catch up - get their OSes to be modernized, create platforms and embrace capacitative touch screens. All this to say, initially Apple had great marketing and a great vision and a lukewarm experience delivered in a shiny package, at least that's how I experienced it.
phendrenad2 5y ago
Why do we have a duopoly? You can draw a direct logical line to the complexity of shipping apps through an app store. Right now, an app, say, Spotify, has to create two versions of their app (iOS and Android), and package them for the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. (Buuut that's not even the whole truth. Mobile OS updates frequently break backward compatibility, so iOS and Android apps need to gracefully handle backward and forward compatibility, often special-casing different OS versions or screen resolutions). Anyway, if, say, Amazon resuscitated their Fire Phone, which would use the Amazon App Store, then Spotify would have to package their app for the Amazon store... which costs developer (or at least a release coordinator) time. That's a barrier to entry that doesn't exist in the PC ecosystem.
- igorstellar 5y ago
  > That's a barrier to entry that doesn't exist in the PC ecosystem. Unless you're using some native language like C++ and cross-platform UI framework like QT or js/Electron you have even bigger diversity problem in the PC ecosystem. There are Windows (x86/arm), macOS (x86/arm), linux (variable desktop environments), Chrome OS, ... You would need to provide builds for all the OS and hopefully also provide Store versions (Windows Store, AppStore, Snap)
  - thayne 5y ago
    to be fair that is probably a major reason that we haven't seen the year of the linux desktop, and for that matter no other OS has really been able to break the Windows/Mac duopoly in desktop OSes.
- pmontra 5y ago
  I remember that I was ardently hoping that Windows Mobile would fail soon because of the extra cost it added to development. One platform is too little (remember IE6) and three is too much. And yet I work with a Linux laptop but I build web apps deployed to Linux servers.
amelius 5y ago
Is it really a duopoly, considering that for Google the real users are advertisers not smartphone owners?
politician 5y ago
Duopolies are a consequence of antitrust law, specifically that the Executive branch fails to apply the law and the Legislative branch keeps it on the books. Given our government, we’re actually fairly fortunate to end up with the Apple/Google duopoly of near peers instead of the asymmetric Intel/AMD chip duopoly or the laughable Google/Mozilla browser duopoly.
- scarface74 5y ago
  So big bad Apple caused Microsoft, Nokia, etc not to be able to compete even though they had a multiple year head start and at the time that the iPhone came out, they were both much larger. Not to mention Rim and Palm were shipping phones for ages.
  - politician 5y ago
    That many competitors became two is simply proof of my point: a duopoly that cannot consolidate further due to the existential threat posed by an underused ancient law.
    - scarface74 5y ago
      So should the government have stepped in to prop up RIM and Microsoft? Should they have forced app makers to support other platforms? What could the government do to help inept competitors?
      - politician 5y ago
        The government should not be helping inept competitors or propping up minor players. The government should be enforcing antitrust laws on the giants that are too big to fail colluding to workaround antitrust by balancing a duopoly against the interests of the citizenry.
        scarface74 5y ago
        Specifically, what should they be doing? What policies?
anonuser123456 5y ago
I think MS will eventually get around to launching a phone again, probably as Android breaks away from Qualcomm. MS is building laptops around Qcom chips now. That’s a good stepping stone, since you can profitably prototype a on those laptops. MS has all the core components needed for mobile.
- seabrookmx 5y ago
  And they're working with Amazon for Android app support on Windows. If they quietly make that work well (kind of like ChromeOS did) they could just use that on their future mobile OS and it'd go a long way to solve their "no apps" problem.
alliao 5y ago
it's probably more of a duopsony than a duopoly, judging by their margins
usrn 5y ago
We will never have good mobile OSs until people acknowladge that "modern" mobile OSs are entirely a regression. If this ever happens then OSes like PostMarketOS are the future.
emptyparadise 5y ago
I miss Windows Phone.
nivenkos 5y ago
Using the Steam Deck makes me wish we had a decent Linux mobile platform.

93 points by zdw 5y ago

Imagine a world where Ballmer wasn't blinded by the desktop and enterprise market during the 2000s, and Windows Phone actually became a thing, and we had true competition among flagship phones today. Imagine a Surface Pro phone with modern specs that could sideload any x86 application. One can dream.

SemanticStrengh 5y ago
Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner
- ramesh31 5y ago
  >Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner I think this is what never made sense to me about the failure of Windows Phone. They have a store. They have an operating system. They have an unbelievably extensive list of hardware partners with decades of manufacturing experience. They have some of the best engineers in the world. And yet, they ceded the single largest consumer industry to Google and Apple. The only explanation is poor leadership.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    Windows phone had to introduce a store, operating system, and new hardware partners. The store was launched in tandem with Windows Phone and not added to the Desktop version until 2 years later. The OS and existing software base they had was irrelevant for small touch screens. The hardware partners they had weren't relevant to the mobile space and they weren't doing enough hardware development themselves to just rely on the in-staff hardware folks they had. Eventually they tried all these things but too late. They tried rebuilding the OS to be for more than just desktops, they tried rebuilding app platforms to not be platform specific, they tried rebuilding the interface to not be use type specific. It lead to a lot of angst due to the churn and a failure in the mobile space as their competitors already had working alternatives to all of these before they even launched. Poor leadership for sure but in waiting through all the 2000s and letting other's fill the space not because they already had everything made for them and let it fall apart. Xbox is one area that has seemed to really pan out for them which got all of these changes over time but again they launched that in the early 2000s not the early 2010s.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Windows Phone came out at a time when smartphones were still lifestyle products. Apple was the king of the hill in that respect and Google was still perceived as a pretty cool company even if having an Android phone wasn't as showy as having an iPhone. Having a phone from Microsoft meant you were probably a corporate weenie who wore pleated khakis and spent their day in a cubicle. The quality of the phone and the OS didn't really play into the perception of it. It's interesting that the perception wasn't the same in other parts of the world. Windows Phone seemed to be a premium product in Argentina. Think it had good acceptance in parts of Europe too, likely due to the Nokia versions. Perhaps trying to conquer the world except North America could have been a viable strategy but that's hard to really know and given the influence of the North American market on global culture, it might not have worked.
    - scarface74 5y ago
      Android didn’t succeed because anyone thought Google was cool. Android succeeded because it was ubiquitous when Apple was only available on AT&T and because Androids phones were cheaper.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    I still think the largest balkanization factor in the current duopoly was the cellphone carriers. They have to support the phones they sell. They want as few variables in their support matrix. QED: three options is too many. Windows Phone had several major opportunity positions where they had all the software the needed and all the hardware they needed to make a statement and then: cellphone carriers simply refused to sell SIM cards to them. For pretty much the entire lifespan of Windows Phone it generally only had one of two major US carriers reluctantly shipping its flagship and the other supposedly "angry" at Microsoft and refusing to even allow it SIM cards on its network, with flip flopping which one was which between different "flagship" phones. How does any product survive in an ecosystem that harsh?
    - blep_ 5y ago
      I still find it bizarre that phone carriers sell phones. This shouldn't be an issue, in much the same way "Comcast only supports Dell and Lenovo laptops" would be incredibly weird.
      - selectodude 5y ago
        But Comcast does only support Comcast modems. They’ll give you access but if you call with a question they’ll tell you tough shit and blame your hardware.
        blep_ 5y ago
        That hasn't been my experience, in lots of years of having to call them and make them fix dumb things. Once you get past the "no, I am quite sure there is no wifi interference on this cat5e cable" bit of the Generic Support Script, they do seem to be capable of understanding where the problem could plausibly be. (Ability to do anything about it varies.) They even helpfully provide a compatibility list: https://www.xfinity.com/support/devices/#unauth https://www.xfinity.com/support/devices/#unauth
      - WorldMaker 5y ago
        Well, it's not just selling phones that is the issue but selling SIM cards. That's closer to the "Comcast only supports cable modems with Mac addresses they've identified and Command & Control functionality they need" analogy. (Which are things that cable modems support. Cable company operators can force certain cable modem operations similar to the way SIM cards support such things.) But also, it really isn't all that bizarre, it's got long precedent: For most of a century all phones were leased and the phone company controlled every bit of hardware on the network. That's not even the distant past, that's still in living memory, my parents grew up in households with leased phones. It took major anti-trust/monopoly breakup work to change that. So far the "use whatever phone you want" is the anomaly in the history of phone networks. (Cable companies too; most of their history all of their equipment was only leased and the era of being able to buy your own set top boxes and/or cable modems is a relatively brief anomaly versus the longer history of those networks.) The US is back down to only two/three major cell carriers (no matter how many "brands" you see; so many of them are just resellers), depending on how you want to count them (by network compatibility: two; by parent company: three). It may be time to trust-bust again.
- KoftaBob 5y ago
  Between their introduction of Surface phones like the Duo, and their Microsoft Launcher, it seems like they're aiming for that down the road.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  What would be the point of Microsoft failing with Android in the same ways that Amazon and Samsung have already failed here? (Admittedly, I still don't se a lot of the point in Microsoft running Chromium Edge other than sadness and defeat. I use Chromium Edge on my work machine because they block Firefox and I dislike Chrome and Chromium Edge is such a sad shell of what Edge once was.)
  - SemanticStrengh 5y ago
    The point you're missing is that Microsoft is actively improving chromium
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      I don't think I'm "missing" that point, but I do think you are missing mine: Amazon has tried to improve the Android ecosystem since day one, on the taking things at face value that Android was supposed to be an open platform for innovation, and instead has failed in just about every possible way. More than any other company, Amazon continues to prove that you cannot improve Android without Google's rubber stamp and that no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. Amazon's App Store is still the next biggest Android App Store after Google's and it can barely be listed as an "Also Ran" on the scorecard way below Google's numbers. Samsung similarly has spend nearly as much effort trying to improve Android and seen all sorts of failures. They've proved that few care about AOSP hardware improvements if it doesn't have Google's rubber stamp. They've proved in their own attempts no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. They've proved that you can't use AOSP certified hardware to bypass the cellphone carriers' extreme aversion to a Third option in the ecosystem and continue to fail at trying to bring Tizen phones to market (because the cell carriers don't care about AOSP, they care about "Android" TM, Google Style). What kind of "active improvement" can Microsoft bring to Android that Amazon and Samsung haven't already tried and failed at? What would be any sort of point in Microsoft investing in AOSP-based products when they have no easier time of selling them through today's cell carriers than they had with a proven Kernel and software stack that they own entirely? Especially without Google's complete consent and access to "Play Services" and the Google App Store moat, what can Microsoft possibly offer in Android that they couldn't better offer in "Windows Phone 11" that wouldn't also see the same extraordinary bad luck/worse market conditions than Windows Phone <= 10? (ETA: Especially all that as opposed to by the time Edge switched to Chromium there were already a half-dozen other browsers using Chromium as their base and also Microsoft had already contributed multiple improvements to Chromium for years. There's no "success stories" in "Open Source" Android. There's very few people running de-Gooogled Android successfully and no one has been able to market one successfully in stores. Microsoft themselves even contributed cash for some of the hard lessons of Cyanogen, Inc.'s funding for their eventual burnout.)
somethoughts 5y ago
Alternatively its interesting to imagine if instead of buying Nokia, Ballmer had instead doubled down more fully on cloud and bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in order to compete with Amazon AWS. Azure wouldn't be playing catch up now. It'd be challenging to try to sell handset manufacturers a WinMo license to compete with Apple (who makes money from HW and only more recently apps/subscription services) when Google was giving Android away for free to the same handset manufacturers. Even historically low margin Amazon gave up on the Fire phone. Additionally smartphones are a very visible consumer facing product and thus very visible from an anti-trust populism perspective. [1] Imagine Steve Ballmer testifying in congress like Zuckerberg, Cook, Dorsey, etc. - he would totally have bungled it. That said for consumers (rather than MSFT shareholders) a triopoly is for sure better than a duopoly. [1] Bill Gates thinks Windows Mobile would have beaten Android without Microsoft’s antitrust woes https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windows-mobile-android-competition-comments-microsoft-antitrust https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windo...
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in order to compete with Amazon AWS Microsoft’s (enterprise) customers weren’t ready for the cloud back then. They could have made a bid for the rest of the market, but I’m not sure the rest of the market wanted Microsoft.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  It would've been nice if Nokia had made another MeeGo smartphone after the N9 with the same sort of quality and usability.
- scarface74 5y ago
  Standard disclaimer: I work for AWS all opinions on my own. I wouldn’t even say Azure is playing catch up to AWS. Azure is a strong second as far as marketshare. It also has a company behind it that knows enterprise and knows how to cater to it. Technologically, I can’t think of a single enterprise/startup need it couldn’t meet. MS’s developer tools have always been great. Yes, I realize that this is a “Nixon goes to China” post. Winning in mobile is a Pyrrhic victory for Google. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google only made a $27 billion profit on Android from 2010-2016. Google gives more than half that much per year to Apple to be the default search engine. Losing mobile was the best thing that could have happened to MS. It let them concentrate on being everywhere.
danuker 5y ago
> that could sideload any x86 application Too bad even desktop Windows is pushing for an App Store, gradually taking control away. I see where this is going. One reason I'd use Windows anymore is if I needed a dedicated GPU now with Windows-only drivers, for its computing efficiency. I wouldn't count on it being available long-term, as proprietary software eventually loses support and compatibility with the rest of the world. However, I don't need such special hardware, and I am perfectly happy with an integrated GPU. The heaviest video or massively-parallel tasks that I perform do not warrant a dedicated one, and I run them on my CPU. The other reason I'd use Windows is if a customer required me to do so (and of course I'd charge for it).
guessbest 5y ago
Windows Mobile was a thing and sideloading was the standard method of installing applications. WinCE also had handwriting recognition built in to every device running locally on a 200MHz arm processor with 16 Meg of RAM. Programming was possible on WinCE 6 using .NET 2 or 3.5 as well as C++. It was very performant on a device with 64 Megs of RAM. I guess the problem was that versions after WinCE 7 binaries were not compatible with the previous versions as well as Microsoft working solely through OEM's for releases rather than direct to consumer like Apple or Google's partnerships. There were lots of also rans in the industry such as Palm OS Cobalt (6.0) not being used by anyone and the Amazon Fire. Article from 2007 : > Of course, the discussion included the upcoming Apple iPhone and Mr. Ballmer had a few funny things to say about the device. >> It's sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get. https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60-vs-apple-iphone-at-3/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60...
- ansible 5y ago
  What Ballmer and others missed (or blithely ignored) was the user experience with the iPhone vs other devices back in 2007. I had used various PDAs and mobile phones that had Internet access (of a sort) back then. Generally speaking, they had very tiny screens, a poor or nonexistent touchscreen, grossly underpowered processors with insufficient RAM, a cut-down network stack, and a crappy "browser". The best pre-iPhone experience (that I experienced) was the Moto Q, running Windows CE, which actually had WiFi and a almost tolerable text browser. I won't even talk about WAP and WML and how well all that worked. Compare that to the debut iPhone. Much larger capacitive touchscreen, smooth scrolling, pinch zoom / expand and more. You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Then you see all the effort put into the UI for the address book and other apps, and that all adds up to a user experience quite unlike anything else at the time. Revolutionary. A better experience than even the Windows CE handheld PDAs.
loudmax 5y ago
While we're at it, let's imagine a world where BeOS succeeded on the desktop. People without the technical inclination to run open source would have a choice of multiple competing commercial desktop environments rather than the current duopoly.
jayd16 5y ago
Why would it be x86? The OS isn't the holdout there. Android even supports x86.
mrkramer 5y ago
If that happened Android wouldn't exist but funny enough I trust Google more than Microsoft because Google at least pretends it cares with its once famous motto "Don't be evil".
- scarface74 5y ago
  I trust a company a lot more whose business proposition is “I give them money and they give me stuff” than having an ad tech company’s operating system running on my phone.
enos_feedler 5y ago
I think about this all the damn time. Imagine how much higher quality and stable the software stack would be if Microsoft took all of their lessons working with OEMs, chipset makers (GPUs, etc) for Windows and applied that to mobile. Instead we got an unengineered hot garbage driver interface that broke compatibility with every major android release. Absolute zero continuity across any low level APIs. Camera HAL, HAL 2, HAL 3! Isn’t the point of an abstraction layer to generalize functionality enough that you can grow into future devices and feature sets without a complete redesign of the interfaces? Google has zero vision of where mobile hardware was headed. Android design was built on Google promo culture not product design
sifar 5y ago
I like to imagine where the Meego based Nokia N9 was not burnt before launch by MS. It was far ahead of iphone/android. Things might have been different with it and it's successors.

SemanticStrengh 5y ago

I find it weird how perfectly stable the marketshare is https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide What are the odds.. Edit: actually Apple has gained marketshare in the last few years up to 29% then fallen to 27% and since stagnate to it. Despite being much much more APKs than Ipas (and the gradient likely increasing (any data ?), this doesn't seems to affect much markestshare. What the IOS market needs to fall is to miss some killer apps.

deleted 5y ago
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ink_13 5y ago
If you increase the timescale, those numbers actually show that iOS has increased its market share by 10% since late 2018, which is also interesting.
- fckgw 5y ago
  Not too long after the introduction of the iPhone SE and Apple keeping older models in their lineup to act as cheaper options to their yearly flagship phone. I'm sure a $399 SE has taken a chunk of Android's market share.
  - brewdad 5y ago
    I made the switch to Apple a year ago. I was tired of losing support 12-18 months after purchase and having my phones be practically unusable after 2 years. I have no interest in messing about with 3rd party OSes, I just want a phone that works. So far, I don't regret the change. Check back in a year to see if my battery still holds an all day charge.
    - selectodude 5y ago
      And a new battery is, what, $50?
    - 5y ago

pphysch 5y ago

In theory, the duopoly would be broken by manufacturers from other countries, but those products would just get banned in America.

wombat-man 5y ago
Why do you think this?
- wyre 5y ago
  Because Hauwei is a competitor from another country but is banned in America
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    There's plenty of foreign phone manufacturers that sell in America. The idea that the US would ban them solely for being foreign is absurd.
  - tristor 5y ago
    Huawei is banned because they installed backdoors for a hostile foreign government in their devices and got caught. Not "just" because they're foreign. You can buy lots of Chinese made and foreign-made handsets in the US.
  - wombat-man 5y ago
    I mean you talk about manufacturers most android phones are not American these days.. We're talking about operating systems where the moat is a lot more about the app ecosystem
    - wyre 5y ago
      Ya, I don’t think the GP is correct either, but I’m sure some people see Hauwei/US relations as part of a great anti-China conspiracy.
gilrain 5y ago

didibus 5y ago

I find the desktop duopoly even more annoying.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
It's more like a triopoly, isn't it? Linux is a reasonable choice for a consumer OS on laptops/desktops, at least for techies. Much more so than non-Android/iOS options on mobile. Especially with the work Valve has done to make Linux gaming more easily accessible, even releasing a Linux-based handheld console.
- ajvs 5y ago
  Even non-techies really, as long as you have someone to do that first install since there's very few companies that offer Linux as the default OS for their hardware.
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    Eh, there's definitely issues where you do a search to see how to change/fix something and the most prominent results tell you to delve into the command line. As long as that's true, it's harder to recommend to non-techies imo.
linguae 5y ago
I disagree; I find it harder to migrate away from the iOS/Android duopoly than it is to migrate from the macOS/Windows duopoly. Because so much of modern desktop computing has migrated to the Web, I can use any operating system that supports a modern Web browser. LibreOffice has pretty good compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats for my needs at home; the only time I need Microsoft Office is at work, where I have access to Windows and macOS anyway. I could migrate to Linux or one of the BSDs full time at home if I wanted to (I currently use both FreeBSD and Windows 10), and the only thing I'd lose would be access to some DRM-protected media from iTunes I purchased years ago. However, if I were to give up my iPhone for a phone running GNU/Linux rather than Android, I'd have to give up many apps that I depend on, some of them with no Web versions. The smartphone situation today feels like how the Linux desktop was in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

Syonyk 5y ago

> Convergence was, if you go back and re-watch that video from the iPhone launch linked above, the big selling point of the iPhone. It is a media player, an internet browser, and a mobile phone all in one. And these days, it is a camera, a satellite navigation system, and a payment card too. So it is not enough to make a good phone, you have to make a good all-of-those-things. Or people have to be willing to go back to "Not all of this in one thing." And there are some nice benefits there. "Separate things" don't tend to data mine in the way that modern smartphones do, and I'm not too concerned about my not-at-all-networked camera submitting stuff upstream without me realizing it. I don't mind having music separate again, and I've been re-acquainting myself with internal navigational skills using paper maps and written directions to get around. It was nice when "all the things" were on a single device, and I've done that, but as I'm more and more opposed to "turning everything I do into extracted behavioral surplus," going back to separate things makes sense - and, realistically, it doesn't suck nearly as much as I expected it to. I now carry a phone that does calling and texting and... if I'm in the mood for pain, some bluetooth audio to speakers. It'll do calling via BT to the car if I bother to turn it on, and that's about as fancy as I normally get. Though anymore, I'm as likely to forget the phone as not when I go places. Photos are done with a pocket camera now, going back to that which I did for years. I take fewer photos, but it's fine, and it also means that working on projects I'm documenting, I don't have the distraction of the phone there. I have a camera, and it takes pictures. It's a different approach to life, more of a return to a 90s/early 2000s approach, but I've been quite happy with it, and find it a welcome change from "Everything in one device."

linmob 5y ago
The fun fact is, that when Purism write convergence, they‘re after what Canonicals' Ubuntu Touch (which sadly is not mentioned at all in the post) meant with Convergence and what Microsoft called "Continuum": Plugging your phone into a laptop dock or a monitor, keyboard + mouse and be able to use it as a "proper Computer". This requires "convergent apps" which change menus and sometimes even add features when they are run on a larger canvas of pixels. It's supposed to be even more in one device.

MBCook 5y ago

Is it really a surprise we ended up with a duopoly? Apple was the first modern smartphone with the iPhone and quickly got apps. That caused massive growth. Google was right there too, also had apps on a modern platform. They saw what people wanted. Everyone else was late to the party with their modern OSes. MS, Palm, BB. By the time they arrived Android and iOS already had a big lead. It’s hard to get a company to develop their apps for your 3rd+ place platform with almost no market share. So you have no apps. So things get worse. It was basically first mover advantage. Palm might have been OK but they were screwed over by Verizon. MS may have survived in 3rd but they kept rebooting their platform and breaking compatibility. Now the duopoly is too strong for anyone to break into without pouring insane amounts of cash in that will likely never return a profit. Until there is another big shift, I don’t see things changing. The current game is over, Google and Apple are too far ahead at it.

vvanders 5y ago
Everybody forgets about sidekick in this comparison. Had apps, email(push pop3!), IM, a functional browser was a killer device esp considering what hardware they were working with at the time.
eptcyka 5y ago
I have to argue that the original iPhone, as it was released, had no apps, the camera was not good and iOS had a laughable feature set. It quickly evolved to be much better than it's initial version, but I remember being rather upset that I had wait until iOS 3 or iOS 4 to get copy and paste support - a feature which I had on my Symbian phone for literal years. And my Symbian phone had multitasking for ages too. And it could film video. The iPhone had a handful of impressive features, but it was not all too useful for the first few iterations, aside from Safari - that was a game changer. Other manufacturers weren't late to the party, they had already gone home well drunk by the time Apple arrived. Their offerings hadn't advanced much for years, and it took years for incumbents to realize they need to catch up - get their OSes to be modernized, create platforms and embrace capacitative touch screens. All this to say, initially Apple had great marketing and a great vision and a lukewarm experience delivered in a shiny package, at least that's how I experienced it.

phendrenad2 5y ago

Why do we have a duopoly? You can draw a direct logical line to the complexity of shipping apps through an app store. Right now, an app, say, Spotify, has to create two versions of their app (iOS and Android), and package them for the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. (Buuut that's not even the whole truth. Mobile OS updates frequently break backward compatibility, so iOS and Android apps need to gracefully handle backward and forward compatibility, often special-casing different OS versions or screen resolutions). Anyway, if, say, Amazon resuscitated their Fire Phone, which would use the Amazon App Store, then Spotify would have to package their app for the Amazon store... which costs developer (or at least a release coordinator) time. That's a barrier to entry that doesn't exist in the PC ecosystem.

igorstellar 5y ago
> That's a barrier to entry that doesn't exist in the PC ecosystem. Unless you're using some native language like C++ and cross-platform UI framework like QT or js/Electron you have even bigger diversity problem in the PC ecosystem. There are Windows (x86/arm), macOS (x86/arm), linux (variable desktop environments), Chrome OS, ... You would need to provide builds for all the OS and hopefully also provide Store versions (Windows Store, AppStore, Snap)
- thayne 5y ago
  to be fair that is probably a major reason that we haven't seen the year of the linux desktop, and for that matter no other OS has really been able to break the Windows/Mac duopoly in desktop OSes.
pmontra 5y ago
I remember that I was ardently hoping that Windows Mobile would fail soon because of the extra cost it added to development. One platform is too little (remember IE6) and three is too much. And yet I work with a Linux laptop but I build web apps deployed to Linux servers.

amelius 5y ago

Is it really a duopoly, considering that for Google the real users are advertisers not smartphone owners?

politician 5y ago

Duopolies are a consequence of antitrust law, specifically that the Executive branch fails to apply the law and the Legislative branch keeps it on the books. Given our government, we’re actually fairly fortunate to end up with the Apple/Google duopoly of near peers instead of the asymmetric Intel/AMD chip duopoly or the laughable Google/Mozilla browser duopoly.

scarface74 5y ago
So big bad Apple caused Microsoft, Nokia, etc not to be able to compete even though they had a multiple year head start and at the time that the iPhone came out, they were both much larger. Not to mention Rim and Palm were shipping phones for ages.
- politician 5y ago
  That many competitors became two is simply proof of my point: a duopoly that cannot consolidate further due to the existential threat posed by an underused ancient law.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    So should the government have stepped in to prop up RIM and Microsoft? Should they have forced app makers to support other platforms? What could the government do to help inept competitors?
    - politician 5y ago
      The government should not be helping inept competitors or propping up minor players. The government should be enforcing antitrust laws on the giants that are too big to fail colluding to workaround antitrust by balancing a duopoly against the interests of the citizenry.
      - scarface74 5y ago
        Specifically, what should they be doing? What policies?

anonuser123456 5y ago

I think MS will eventually get around to launching a phone again, probably as Android breaks away from Qualcomm. MS is building laptops around Qcom chips now. That’s a good stepping stone, since you can profitably prototype a on those laptops. MS has all the core components needed for mobile.

seabrookmx 5y ago
And they're working with Amazon for Android app support on Windows. If they quietly make that work well (kind of like ChromeOS did) they could just use that on their future mobile OS and it'd go a long way to solve their "no apps" problem.

alliao 5y ago

it's probably more of a duopsony than a duopoly, judging by their margins

usrn 5y ago

We will never have good mobile OSs until people acknowladge that "modern" mobile OSs are entirely a regression. If this ever happens then OSes like PostMarketOS are the future.

emptyparadise 5y ago

I miss Windows Phone.

nivenkos 5y ago

Using the Steam Deck makes me wish we had a decent Linux mobile platform.