I can see the smartphone market going the same way that the home computer went in the 1980's. In those days companies such as Commodore, Sinclair, Dragon, NewBear and a plethora of others tried to become the de-facto standard home computer by providing a quirky advantage. In the end, none of the forerunners of the day actually won because a single, extensible, cheap, competent standard, the IBM PC proved to be best.
We have seen the rise and fall of Symbian, the rise of IOS and the chaotic emergence of Android with it's 99^N different configurations all struggling to live in the same yurt.
In recent days Ubuntu Linux has declared an interest in the smartphone arena and now Mozilla declares that it is releasing a smartphone OS. ENOUGH ALREADY!!
There is nothing that drives customers away from a platform as much as despite from the poor developer tasked with writing code for the platform. If the OS is easy to use and generates income for the starving programmer then it will succeed. If it is a pain to program and generates poor revenue, it will fail.
Historically, Microsoft have made great developer tools. the visual Studio IDE is second to none and makes my job easy. I make money with Microsoft on the desktop and Apple on the phone. I find Android interesting but miserably useless at generating revenue. Android is no more than vehichle for Google adverts and nothing more.
What possible use is Mozilla's Firefox OS though? Unless it has truly phenomenal advantages it is doomed to an early grave as an interesting historical footnote. I say it's the new Jupiter Ace.
No comments:
Post a Comment