There has been a lot of buzz these past few days about Apple’s battle against the world. Apple picked 2 influential companies directly, Google and Adobe, and many smaller ones indirectly.
History tells the story of a once integrated solution provider Apple vs. a use it everywhere Microsoft. Today Android is allowing it’s system to run on any hardware and will be running on non-Apple tablets. The adoption will generate an increasing base of users on Android which in turn will create incentives for application developers to focus on this open platform to generate revenues. That’s been the history so far…
Apple consumers might become a niche of early adopters fading away while the masses might find Android powered devices to be “good enough”. Besides, Apple is making things tough for application developers and is ultimately affecting its consumers today as, for example, they have trouble using flash based applications. Switching costs for Apple users to start using Android devices are still not that high so there is still an opportunity for the market to tilt towards Android and once the network effects kick in it will be a winner-takes-all play.
Steve Jobs has suffered the results of these dynamics before and is still playing the game all over again. Does he have something that powerful to prevent this natural effect or is he so obnoxious that he will bet his company and hope for the best? It will be fun and exciting to watch and see if new theory can be written!
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