OS Wars: The Sequel

Haven’t we seen this before? Apple producing a product on their hardware and running their own Operating system vs. an operating system running on a myriad of hardware configurations and companies? Of course this time there are many more players and both Apple and Android are currently minority players in the mobile phone market, though they seem to get a share of the press far beyond their market share. Rim’s OS (blackberry) and Symbian (Nokia) have much larger market share. Nor can we forget that HP may become a player in this field with their recent purchase of Palm, which gives them WebOS, which was fairly well reviewed, though not commercially successful.
 
OS Wars the original also had its share of players outside of Microsoft and Apple. IBM had OS/2, late 70’s and early 80’s had several flavors of DOS, and of course the Unix (and later Linux) OS has lived by the creed of never say die. Regardless an OS came to dominate the market that was open, in the sense, that many manufacturers could create devices that used said OS. Apple lost. In that perhaps is a lessen for this second round of the Operating system battles. The closed environments (notably Apple and RIM) may have a tough fight in the long term against the more open environments (recently Android but also including Symbian).
 
Of course the big item in Android’s favor is that it is essentially free for mobile developers to make use off. The real strength of Android may lay in the same area that IBM PC’s found. Competition. Several manufacturers making compatible products will lead to cheaper prices and better items in the long run, even if confusion and instability in the market appears in the short term. It is that reason I expect android based phones to wind up dominating the smart phone marketplace. And lessons from the 80’s should be learned by RIM and Apple. And if Apple is not careful and smart it will likely lose this OS War as well (though even more likely is that Apple will still make a pile of money even if the battle is lost).