I came across two interesting bits of news. First of which is about Android, possibly, having outsold the iPhone. This data, from NPD, may not be absolutely accurate and reflective of the real market, but it does suggest a trend of rapidly rising Android popularity. Until the end of 2009, I myself haven’t been particularly impressed with Android. There weren’t any killer hardware then, and the promise of an open Android platform was, in my opinion, not sufficiently open as I thought it should have been.
But 2010 started off with many good things going for Android, one of which is Google’s own branded phone, the Nexus One. I’m still not terribly pleased about the state of proprietary drivers and various other software packages, but I think there is a direction that phones are quick becoming like commodity PCs. This is, of course, the model that Google wants: the hardware doesn’t matter, you still get access to Google services.
The second news is a rumour about possibly free MobileMe service. This is likely the result of the growing competition between Apple and Google. I always thought MobileMe ought to have been free. Apple wants to sell hardware. Their services had always been the means to get people to buy their hardware. Why, then, charge for the services. I’m not sure if MobileMe is really that great, so even if it had been free, it may not be enough to win Mac/iPhone/iPad users over from Google services. But “free” will surely be a good start.
Now, the interesting question is, which platform will prevail in the next 5 years? I’m wondering if Android/Google will be the Microsoft of the mobile platform, and the iPhone OS will be something like what the Mac OS X is in the PC world right now?
Oh, and Microsoft is in danger of becoming irrelevant. The only thing “precious” about Microsoft right now is Office. There is no better Office. As much as pockets of users around the world want to commit to OpenOffice, I still think Microsoft Office is better. Maybe Microsoft would be forced to open-source Office and sell services around it.
I like the idea of web/online services. But I’m worried about the domination of Google. What would really be cool is, if we could configure another service provider and our Android device will work just as it had, without needing Google at all. We need to be able to replace Google, just like being able to configure a different IMAP server for email. So if Google turns evil, we could simply subscribe to a different service provider.
But of course, Google wants world domination. If they can squabble with another country government, and direct resources of the NSA… I’d wonder what they could do next.
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