Steve Jobs said He never saw the similarity between his fight with Android and his fight with Bill Gates and Microsoft in the 1980s. But almost everyone else inside and outside of Apple did. It seemed unfathomable that Jobs would lose two battles in the same way a generation apart. But with so many similarities between the two dogfights, it was hard not to think about it.
Platform wars tend to be winner-take-all competitions. If Apple and Google’s mobile platforms somehow coexist harmoniously, it will be a historical aberration.
Android and iPhone were in a platform war, and platform wars tend to be winner-take-all competitions. The winner ends up with more than 75 percent of the market share and profits, and the loser ends up struggling to stay in business.
In the fight between Microsoft and Apple, Microsoft won by distributing its software more widely, which created a larger selection of applications to purchase, which attracted more customers. Once customers spent hundreds of dollars on applications that ran on a single platform, it was much harder to get them to switch. Eventually everyone started using computers with Microsoft DOS and then Windows because everyone else was doing it. This was not lemming-like behavior, but completely rational. Computers were only useful if work done on one machine could be used on another machine.
This was almost precisely Android’s strategy. The Android ecosystem was still far from strong in 2010. The Android app store was poorly organized and developers had a hard time making money there. Apple’s three-year head start had allowed it to sell nearly 60 million iPhones, create a store with more than 200,000 apps, and establish a developer ecosystem for which more than $1 billion had been paid in two years.
“It’s like the battle for monopolies that cable and telephone manufacturers won 30 or 40 years ago.”
But since any phone maker could make an Android phone, the size of the Android platform was exploding.
By the end of 2010, it was as big as the iPhone. And it seemed only a matter of time before Google fixed the problems with its app store. The most worrying thing for Apple was that then-Android boss Andy Rubin could succeed. without having to convince many iPhone customers to switch. The number of people around the world who would switch from cell phones to smartphones in the coming years was going to be so enormous that it only needed to focus on that group – not necessarily iPhone customers – to gain a dominant share of the smartphone market. smart phones.
