Several things have converged from yesterday and this morning to inspire this post. It won’t talk directly to “story” but there are certainly a lot of them formulating around these issues and ideas.
Yesterday, the president of AT&T weighed in on the tethering issue surrounding the iPhone. The long and short of that was the network infrastructure just wasn’t ready to support the demand. Kinda’ scary that, huh? It does speak to the success and numbers that the iPhone has achieved though, doesn’t it? Given that success and all of that stress on the infrastructure, he also started to make noises about data caps. I sort of let that one go after reading the first report of it. I figured he was just blowing off a little steam. Tethering would be nice, but I don’t really need it at the moment, nor in the foreseeable future. I’ve made it this long without it and the world hasn’t spun off its axis.
It was after the “story” started to pick up some steam that I finally woke up and started to pay attention. Data caps on the iPhone service? How in the hell is that going to work? There is just no limit to the amount of stupid in these guys some time. I tweeted this shortly thereafter. “An AT&T #iPhone data cap would sell more Google phones for Verizon than you could shake a stick at. Would void contract. We’d all be gone.” Another story that has been gathering momentum is the forthcoming Google Android phones that will be supported by Verizon. Google and Verizon vs. Apple and AT&T is how the story tellers are trying to frame it. A data cap instituted by AT&T would make that looming war a non issue. Game over. Google and Verizon win. Unless they were to pursue the same short sighted policy. It will be interesting to see if Apple can talk some sense into AT&T on this issue.
Following on the heels of this was a report from Silicon Alley Insider this morning about the incredible lead Apple has with the iPhone in the marketplace. It even started to generate a fair amount of conversation on FriendFeed. My take on this from 33,000 feet is this: The battlefield that is mobile has seen a lot of scuffles thus far. It’s now getting ready for a World War. Four huge players aligned two by two. Platform wars have happened before of course and they always seem to reshape technology and how we use it. Usually for the better and almost always to the consumer’s advantage.
We had a mainframe vs. desktop PC war. A desktop PC vs. notebook war. There is something of a war going on between notebooks and netbooks but I think that it will be overshadowed by the mobile war. We also had an IBM vs. Microsoft war and a Microsoft vs. Apple war in the midst of all of those other wars. And of course, during all of this, there were Telco wars going on after the Ma Bell breakup as well. Can we learn anything from all of those as it relates to this looming mobile battle? Glean any insights?
I think that we can and I think that Steve Jobs already has. He learned it during his first stint at Apple. The insight is this. Software wins wars. In particular, software developed by a well nourished developer eco system wins big platform wars. VisiCalc and MSDOS (not PCDOS) kneecapped the mainframe world. The applications that followed on finished the job. Win95 and the developer community that grew around Visual Basic and Visual C drove the adoption of Windows on the desktop and notebook and basically rendered Apple to a niche marketplace. People and corporations bought Windows powered machines because of the software that was available for them. We have put up with and tolerated blue screens of death, virus and malware attacks and all kinds of compatibility issues because of the software we have come to rely on. Doesn’t sound too much different than the grumbles that are going on in the iPhone and Apple app world at the moment does it?
The same thing is taking shape in the mobile space. The iPhone is kicking ass and taking names because of the apps that are available. It certainly isn’t because of the service provider. Read any of the surveys and studies that track iPhone satisfaction and you’ll see that people would dump AT&T in a heartbeat but, they love their phone. Why? Because of the apps. The software. The question is, can Google, with the Android, and with Verizon as the service provider, create the same set of software experiences? And if they can’t, can they get close enough so that Verizon’s service, being so much better that AT&T’s, will make the difference and win the war?
Thus far, outside of the mobile space, Google has not been particularly successful with their developer eco system. They’ve got a great point man in Vic Gundorta and it could be that he eventually gets this all put together. But at the moment, it just doesn’t seem to be happening. Google Wave, which had as much excitement and buzz surrounding it’s release, to the lucky 100K, as anything of late, has fizzled in buzz appeal and usefulness rather quickly. Verizon has said that they are going to go all out in encouraging development of an app store for Android. But, they certainly have no track record in that regard so we’ll have to see.
In the meantime, Apple, its iPhone and app store, even with the often times negative publicity, are winning the battles. But the war has only just begun. Google has an open platform. That appeals to a lot of developers and could turn out to be a huge advantage. What they’re lacking though is something that powered Microsoft and is now enabling Apple as well, a great set of developer tools in an easy to use environment. If something like that springs from the Googlopoly then things will get very interesting indeed. One thing is for sure, we, as consumers, stand to be the big winners if this plays out like the other wars have.
Update: Here’s a link to a story where a Gartner analyst predicts Android to overtake iPhone in 2012. The reason being, in this analysts estimation, that Google will license the Android OS to multiple OEMs. Strength in numbers so to speak. And that could very well be the case. For now, my money is still on the software apps. Whoever rules there will rule the markets.
