Can Any Smartphone Platform Overcome the Android/iOS Duopoly? 404
Nerval's Lobster writes "The company formerly known as Research In Motion—which decided to cut right to the proverbial chase and rename itself 'BlackBerry'—launched its much-anticipated BlackBerry 10 operating system at a high-profile event in New York City Jan. 30. Meanwhile, Microsoft is still dumping tons of money and effort into Windows Phone. But can either smartphone OS — or another player, for that matter — successfully challenge Apple iOS and Google Android, which one research firm estimated as running on 92 percent of smartphones shipped in the fourth quarter of 2012? What would it take for any company to launch that sort of successful effort?"
I'd expect that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of Money (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Microsoft can. It's a matter of how many billions of dollars they want to bleed first. It worked with the XBox. Of course the XBox was also helped by Sony's stupidity.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
As is always the case with /., if the subject is a question, the answer is no.
Unless you let enough time pass, then the answer to this case is most certainly yes. Nobody knows how much time that would be, though.
Better question (Score:5, Insightful)
Can any smartphone platform overcome the Nokia/RIM duopoly?
Something we haven't seen yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
What it will take to break the duopoly is someone bringing me a new capability on the order of the iPod, cell phone, GPS, digital camera, or Palm Pilot. And , of course, it needs to be integrated with the phone. Just giving me a new user interface, or a way to stir facebook, twitter, and the rest of that crap together won't do it. NFC payment systems are trying to be this, but don't make it. Whatever it is will be a whole new class of feature.
Re:Lots of Money (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Microsoft can. It's a matter of how many billions of dollars they want to bleed first. It worked with the XBox. Of course the XBox was also helped by Sony's stupidity.
I was going to ask what you were smoking after reading the first sentence. Reading the rest of the post lends credibility to the possibility, though.
If Apple seriously screws up the next iPhone and Microsoft manages to come up with something far, far better than any OS they've put on a phone ever ... than they might stand a chance of Microsoft coming out over Apple.
It would be hard to beat out Android on all fronts, though ... there have been some seriously crappy Android phones, but I don't think the market has been without great Android phones from at least two different manufacturers in years. So that would require a failure from Google that applied to all manufacturers of Android phones, which doesn't seem too likely.
Re:Better question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd expect that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:firefox or ubuntu (Score:2, Insightful)
Then you'll never have it. Catering to freetards is not profitable.
Re:Better question (Score:4, Insightful)
But most of those people already had phones. So a future market player can sell a foo-phone to the (large) market of people who don't own foo-phones and only own smartphones.
Re:Lots of Money (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think Microsoft can. Microsoft phones have been around for a while now, and not only do they still suck but they're still not popular. AFAICT the Xbox 360 is a fairly decent platform all told, too bad about their overmonetization of Xbox Live but that's not enough to keep them from success. But Windows CE and all its incarnations have always sucked hard, and not in a good way. I imagine that Microsoft will keep up their unvarying record of mediocrity in the mobile space, so I doubt that Microsoft can ever become even the #2 player in mobile no matter how much they spend. They have never demonstrated an ability to make a phone that fucking works.
Do the math, silly ponies (Score:4, Insightful)
Aging population + Jitterbug phone = THE FUTURE
Re:Big Cash Prizes! That's what it takes! (Score:4, Insightful)
It wouldn't hurt anyway. Seriously though. They had better either do something remarkable or have some great features. For example, I'd pay good money for a phone with a physical scrolling wheel. Ditto for sound. Or an On/Off switch that didn't make you wait for the computer to contemplate its navel would be worth something too. Sometimes you can't beat physical controls. Nobody has yet done scrolling right and you always end up clicking something you wish you hadn't.
What? No.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:firefox or ubuntu (Score:4, Insightful)
I love your business plan: Make everything free and spend millions on it with no returns. You should set up a Kickstarter page immediately. I know you'll do well!
Isn't that exactly what Google did with Android? And now they rule the game?
It looks as if his business skills are more aligned with reality than yours.
Re:firefox or ubuntu (Score:5, Insightful)
how can JB not support your hardware?!? oh, because it's not using drivers written for linux, it's stuff written for dalvik.
So how do you think Ubuntu mobile runs on phones if the drivers were written for Dalvik? Especially given that Ubuntu uses the same drivers as Android [ubuntu.com]. You seem very confused about what drivers and/or Dalvik are, Dalvik is a Virtual Machine, drivers do not run in Dalvik.
Invest in walkie-talkies (Score:4, Insightful)
Any asteroid big enough to wipe out Cupertino is going to wipe out whatever economy is necessary to buy new WinPhones and RIMs. No, I think the winners of that civilization-altering event will be the makers of survivalist communication gear like walkie-talkies.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:firefox or ubuntu (Score:4, Insightful)
I love your business plan: Make everything free and spend millions on it with no returns. You should set up a Kickstarter page immediately. I know you'll do well!
Isn't that exactly what Google did with Android? And now they rule the game?
It looks as if his business skills are more aligned with reality than yours.
No, it's not what Google did with Android. Google has enough money in the bank to do stuff "because they feel like it", and see if it could be successful. They weren't banking on Android's success, and they'd continue to be making billions if WebOS was in second place. When you can start from *that* starting line, it's much easier to make it to second place.
From there, it was a timing issue - Apple was the phone that everybody wanted, but at least in America, many of them were either locked into multi-year contracts with their present carrier, or were loyal to them - many frequent domestic travelers swear by Verizon, because for all the Big Red does to royally screw them over, they frequently are the only carrier to have towers in obscure places, and for all of CDMA's faults, it did a much better job of routing calls through multiple towers (thus reducing the number of dropped calls) than the EDGE flavors of GSM. Resultantly, those who didn't want to give up their carrier were prime candidates for the Motorola Droid* when Verizon released it - the billion dollar marketing campaign Verizon did to launch the handset and its then-more-powerful interface didn't hurt the cause either, and neither did the generally-well-liked Google logo. Android took advantage of the fact that Apple and AT&T had an exclusivity contract and a limited feature base to springboard it to popularity. HTC and Samsung stepped up the game, and that's the nutshell version of how Android got the timing right.
UbuntuPhone, Windows Phone, BB10, and UnknownPhone all share similar problems. Windows Phone has a pile of money behind it, but Microsoft has to care if it succeeds and it suffers from a brand with a stigma - I swear if it was green themed and called the "X Phone" it'd have double its present market share. BB10 has some money behind it, but BlackBerry desperately needs it to succeed and it too has a bit of a brand issue ("Who makes the battery inside a Blackberry when they made on which you can't pull it out? Energizer - the alkaline battery will long outlast your system uptime!"). UbuntuPhone has some pocket change behind it, but not a well known brand. UnknownPhone has to start from the ground up with everything. None of these brands have the winning formula of "we don't care if we succeed", "we have a mountain of cash behind us that continues to grow", "we are well liked by our existing customers", "we're affordable", and "people are being held back from getting the phone they really want, so we'll be the fallback until we have enough buzz behind us".
That, however, will not stay that way forever.