It's Not Just Apple vs Android

Feels a little bit as if it should be filed under "yes but obvious".

When you can find large groups of people who will tell you how much they love their Android phone and other large groups of people who tell you how much they love their iPhone, it should be obvious that this isn't a one size fits all situation.

The one thing he doesn't say (possibly because it's also obvious) is that whatever side you're on, you should probably celebrate the situation as the many and varied levels of competitions that exist are driving innovation and we're all benefiting from that.

While its indeed not an zero-sum game where we have a clear good guy and a clear bad guy, there are some clear good outcomes. Lets call them mini-victories.

The patent fight is one of them. Rounded corners, button less interface, menu areas outside the screen. All those are of practical purpose and should never have been allowed to be design patented. Same goes for basic iconic figures for applications, a table view interface, slide to unlock and any "natural" gestures. Then there are FRAND patents, where a clear model for deciding prices would help in making the market more predictable for new ventures.

If we look at DRM, lockdown and DMCA, we also have a mini-victory that we need to fight over. Here we have a moral argument that the device owner should be in control and not Apple, Google or Samsung. Consumers need to get a win here.

I could mention that some actors in all this are behaving worse than others, and if one had to pick one evil over the others then I know where I would lean. But that is just a secondary issue in all this. Primarily, consumers and new actors on the phone market need to win. Those are the true "good guys" in the fight.

> Nokia (with Microsoft) make beautiful hardware and Windows Phone is lush, but for some reason is not getting the market love its quality deserves.

Two points here:

First, it pains me to see MS lumped with Nokia. I'll be clinging to my N9 for a very long time yet (and probably only move on when Ubuntu or Firefox phones are compelling). I miss Maemo/MeeGo.

Second, the reason which MS doesn't get the love which its quality deserves (let's accept that it deserves a lot of love for the sake of this argument) is that Microsoft owns Skype. Telcos aren't huge fans of Skype, as a rule--it doesn't quite jive with their values. For Windows Phone, which integrates Skype by default, to really take off in the marketplace, we need to see the founding of a telco which doesn't do anything BUT data as their subscription model. With no voice fees to compete with Skype's inclusion on the phone, there will be no reason for telcos to marginalize the platform.

While I can see the argument here (and yes, it's valid), how is it any different from them promoting either Android or Apple, where with just a few taps you can download Skype?

Same scenario really - just slightly less convenient.

I used to be a bit like that around 15 years ago, then I learned to appreciate technology for what it is, regardless who does it.