It's interesting that we still look at platforms through the lens of Microsoft's Windows. That was a platform which achieved market dominance and generated huge

It's interesting that we still look at platforms through the lens of Microsoft's Windows. That was a platform which achieved market dominance and generated huge revenues for its creators by way of significant licensing costs. They then also sold content (typically software - Office and various back end tools) to end users at high cost and ate a huge portion of the overall software market revenue. We view high market share as winning because usually it brings high revenues and that means high margins. Today we have something that looks a bit like the PC market did in the 80s - lots of competing platforms, some doing well, others not. Android has not yet achieved the market dominance that DOS/Windows did (i.e. 90+ percent) and it certainly isn't generating anywhere near the kind of revenue for its creators, Google, that DOS/Windows/Office/etc did for Microsoft. Most of the revenue instead appears to be going to Samsung, but even that is only a minority of the revenue for the whole market - by far the largest share is going to Apple. So how do we define Android has having "won"? It has no overwhelming market share, its future looks uncertain (as mentioned in the linked article) and it's only making any serious money for a company that didn't even create it. This puts the claims of winning under serious strain, but they just won't go away. We should want lots of competing platforms. Competition is good for us. Trying to decide that someone has "won" just so we can be the one who called it most decisively, is stupid and short sighted (but understandable, given the desperation of journalists, who like Microsoft, find themselves having to shout louder and louder to be noticed at all). We should resist another dark age like the one we endured under Windows, before post-PC computing made Microsoft charmingly irrelevant. Sure it's nice to grind an axe against nasty nasty Apple, or poke fun at Android selling lots of shitty cheap phones made from 2 year old OSes, or to laugh at Ballmer telling us Windows Phone is going to do really well. It would be nicer if we could recognise that we have multiple really good choices available to us and that is a good thing. Unfortunately we are selfish, tribal creatures, so our wallets and our social graphs will vote this into a monopoly, just like last time.