Android vs iPhone vs Windows Mobile

On a smaller scale, the relative beginnings of the smart phone(PDA) industry have gotten started similarly to the progression of the PC market.  Two of the same major players are involved, taking familiar tacts, and there is a third open-source alternative headed up by a new major player that didn’t exist during the PC’s early days.  Does anyone find it incredibly interesting that three of the largest, most influential technology companies (i.e. Microsoft, Apple and Google) are now in control of the smartphone/mobile operating system industry?  This fact tells us so much about the future of technology and where we can expect to see the biggest leaps made over the next 5-10 years.

For those of you who paid attention while Microsoft and Apple divided up the computer industry 30 years ago, the similarities should be pretty obvious.  Out of the three companies Microsoft entered the ring first with Windows Mobile and sold their product as software that could run on any manufacturers hardware (to a certain extent).  Apple later came to market with a more user friendly and consumer appealing product that was a hardware/software combination, the iPhone.  A good deal later, an open-source alternative was released that offered a more developer friendly platform and could save the corporate and consumer markets millions(billions?) of dollars, Android.

This time around, Microsoft failed to stay ahead of what consumers were asking for.  They failed to create a user-friendly and reliable experience that was as appealing to all types of end-users.  Apple again did a fantastic job marketing to the right demographic and this time managed to secure a huge percentage of the market.  Though, their platform is still locked down to their own hardware, meaning that they can only sell a limited amount of products running their software.  This turned out to be a mistake for them in the race to control the PC market and eventually made it possible for Microsoft to control over 90% of the industry.

The biggest difference between the creation of the PC market and the start of the smartphone market is that the open-source alternative in this case is not a coke-bottle wearing programmer from finland that created Linux, the product is Android and its coming from Google.  Google knows how to stay in front its customers expectations, much like Apple, though their platform is just software and can run on any company’s hardware, which in the past has proven to be a good decision.

I expect to see Apple lose some of it’s market share to Google Android powered devices over the next couple years along with many of the current Microsoft Windows Mobile users.  As the number of developed applications increase along with improvement in hardware designs from companies like HTC, the Google platform will likely become the largest player in the market.