biznotek.com

Recently, I read an article on the growth of android and how its going to beat the iOS share by 2012. The article took me back to the thoughts of the old Desktop wars when Apple and Microsoft were up against each other in a battle where the former was almost thrown out of the business by the later. This time its the smartphone market(growing year over year and expected to be much bigger than the desktop market in the times to come) and the battlefield is set for Apple but with Google this time around(Hey, you left out RIM, Nokia bla bla… Atleast I dont remember them any more … ). The battles are thought to be very similar in a lot of aspects but Apple still looks like following the same path but much more carefully this time (C’mon man, you are being too early to comment). Rest assured, I am a normal human being(no Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Eric Schmidt) and I just tried to analyze the series of events that took place in the battle of 90′s with the events that are taking place in the current battlefield:

The Beautiful Macintosh:

No doubt that Macs were and are beautiful and would remain beautiful since this is what the Apple pioneers in, The User  aesthetics. Now, looking at the battle of desktops, most of the users at the time the battle started were either business users or the educational institutes with an exception of few geeks using the desktops.  The Macs were beautiful but they required you to have a deep pocket to enjoy the beauty. A per mac difference of say some hundred dollars would make a difference of thousands of dollars to a business planning to build their inventory. Businesses rarely cared about the beauty of the machine and apple really had no response to the cost of hardware it used to build its machines.

The ongoing battle is quite different with regards to this aspect. Low call charges and low device costs have lead to a real diverse mobile user base. A huge percentage of this user base places the looks and user aesthetics on priority when it comes to their handset and iPhone really wins hands down on this aspect. Over the last one decade, Apple has also been phenomenal in reducing the cost of their hardware and bring it down to the levels of their competition(take ipod for instance) and as a result of this, you can get the beautiful iPhone at price tag almost similar to any good smart Android device.

The external influence(aka vendors, carriers, developers etc):

As Micrsoft’s OS penetrated further into the market, more number of vendors started building the MS based PCs which lead to further decrease of price of a fully built desktop and hence more problems for Apple. Vendors cut each other’s profits but MS was enjoying cash from its core competency i.e the commercial software. Similarly Developers went on to make the most robust applications for the windows platform making it even stronger and better(shall i say useful).

The challenge for Apple in the today’s era is two fold but a closer look at the challenges gives a feeling that the challenges dont carry that much weight as they did in the desktop era:

1. Apple would never let any other hardware vendor use its proprietary operating system, which is quite understandable.
2. Apple has introduced another layer of external influence i.e the carriers. Apple has bound the iPhone to AT&T network in U.S. Locking iPhone to a carrier is a big stumble block for the users but mind it that Apple is selling it unlocked as well this time, making it a hybrid strategy rather than a rigid hardware bound strategy during the desktop battle .(iPhone is unlocked in a few countries like France, Singapore and comes with two of the major carriers in India(Airtel and Vodafone)).

Last but not the least of the external influences is the developers(developing the much needed applications for the platform). The developer community in today’s world is hardly any problem (as compared to the times when the MS/Apple battle took  place (a few rare species were called as developers then). Developer community is so large in number today that every vendor would get a share of developers dedicated to their platform or building applications across the platforms. You question any feature that you would like to have in today’s smart phone it would be invariably present in almost all the good smartphones regardless of whether its a iPhone or an android or a windows phone (The statement is still much true for an iPhone but others also dont lag that much behind).

The Real Battle

Now here comes the real question. Who is actually fighting the battle? Is it Apple vs all the other hardware vendors plus the Google? No, its not. Its just Apple vs The Google Android. Google Android is an open-source platform and Google is a working on a revenue sharing model with hardware vendors as of now(after failure and withdrawl of Google Nexus One from the market) and trying to integrate their main business(Ads) to the mobile business. Every one knows that one day or the other, Android would get forked (You can say that why would i use some other fork than using the fork directly supported by Google but thats would require separate post to discuss). Now when these forks come into existence then who knows if Android will start showing the downward trend and the battle would suddenly seem like a dummy one.

All in all, Apple seems to be very careful this time and is pretty determined to win the battle as they know the game much better this time around.