Microsoft and Google Deliver Variety

Apple was the first to market with a smartphone that people understood and really wanted. That seems to have the company thinking that they alone know what is good for their customers. That will lead to some serious problems for Apple, and soon.Carriers usually dictate the designs and features to equipment makers, because most phones are sold through the carrier. If you don't make a phone that kowtows to the carrier's desires, you won't sell any phones. Apple's reputation got them a pass on that rule. It's not as if Apple is the only phone maker with good ideas; they were just the only phone maker that could take on a carrier and win. But it also meant that the iPhone experience is still dictated by only one company--it's just Apple instead of the carrier.

So far the benevolent dictator has delivered only two form factors: iPhone and iPad. If you prefer phones that are a bit smaller, or larger, or ones with longer batter life, or a physical keyboard, you are out of luck. Steve Jobs' vision is a singular one, and it doesn't involve any slider phones with chiclet keyboards. You don't like that? Tough.

Microsoft and Google are taking a different approach for mobile devices. Their software is built to run on all kinds of mobile hardware from different manufacturers. Both platforms set some parameters for what the hardware has to provide, but within those parameters there is plenty of room for innovation. The genetic diversity of Android devices is already pretty amazing. There are small screens and large screens, vertical sliders, horizontal sliders, flip-out keyboards, on-screen keyboards, trackball pointers, and tablets. We'll likely see the same kind of variety with Windows Phone 7 if it's successful; I'll even turn that around and say variety will be essential to the success of Windows Phone 7.

By the way, I disagree with Eric Zeman about his reasons for why the Nexus One failed to live up to the hype. It's not that users are opposed to buying their cell phones online, it's that they are used to buying them at mall kiosks or the carrier's own stores, since nearly all phones are subsidized by the carrier. As a thought experiment, consider whether the iPhone would have succeeded as an online-only product. I think the answer is yes.

Nexus One hasn't sold more because (unlike iPhone) it's not the only Android game in town, and Google shouldn't be crying about that. Google's mobile strategy doesn't hinge on the Nexus One; that's just Google setting an example of how a good Android citizen should work. Users who prefer other form factors can get them, which is more than you can say for iPhone. Sales of Android, in all its form factors, are climbing past the iPhone. That should be Google's measure of success.

Apple isn't just trying to dictate hardware form factors, the company wants to dictate the software experience as well. Steve Jobs says that Flash can't deliver decent performance on the iPhone. But it seems to run quite nicely on Android. So perhaps Jobs is just acknowledging that an iPhone, even the upcoming one, doesn't have the horsepower it needs. Why build a faster phone when you can just ban software that makes it look slow?

Ultimately, variety in the market lets users get what they want. Users should choose which products succeed and which don't; not every device will hit a home run. The tight integration of Apple's hardware and software, combined with the company's obsession with controlling the entire experience from beginning to end, helped the company get a great product to market quickly. However, that same monolithic strategy will lead to Apple's coming decline. People want choice, and they certainly don't want a company dictating what they can or cannot have when it's clearly technologically possible.