The current conventional wisdown is that the iPhone is so far ahead of the competition in terms of usability and number of applications available that it’s assured to be the smartphone market leader within a few years. But, according to a recent Vator.tv article, if Apple isn’t careful, history could repeat itself once again.
The year was1983 and Apple had just launched Lisa, the first personal computer to have a graphical user interface (GUI). Over the coming years the GUI operating system was copied by Microsoft which launched their own product under the Windows brand. Although Apple’s operating system was technologically far superior to Windows, it was Microsoft which quickly dominated the market. The main reason, and largest difference between the two, was that Microsoft understood that to gain market share you had to enable third party vendors to license and use the software for their own hardware systems. Apple, on the other hand, felt that to achieve maximum usability, they had to control their operating system completely and therefore didn’t allow any third parties to build their own computers with the Apple OS. This difference led to a far greater distribution power for Windows and nearly to Apple’s demise as their market share dwindled into single digit territory.
Fast forward to today, a miraculous resurrection and millions of iPods and iPhones later, Apple seems still not to have learnt the lesson. As the Vator.tv article points out, the iPhone operating system is still very tightly controlled by Apple which doesn’t allow any third parties to license and install the operating system on their own hardware. Contrast that to Google’s Android mobile operating system (the modern day Microsoft in this story), which was built on open standards (Linux) and developed by an entire consortium of organizations (the Open Handset Alliance), and you start getting a sense that Apple could once again lose out to a copycat product. The Gartner study that Vator.tv quotes, predicts that already by 2012, Apple will have lost out to the Android OS in terms of market share. Today the iPhone controls anywhere between 10 - 13% of the market and this is expected to increase only moderately while the Android OS is expected to grow from its current 1 - 2% up to at least 14 - 15% in the same time frame.
We at Alensa really love the innovation and design aesthetic that Apple brings to the table, so let’s hope that Apple realizes the mistake before it’s too late and finally embraces a more open business model after more than two decades of closed-door policy.
