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The Android Invasion Cometh; Is Resistance Futile?
DeviceGuru writes "Last month, we learned from Gartner that Android will probably be the number-two worldwide mobile OS this year, and may lead the pack by 2014. With Android's growing use as the OS embedded in phones, in tablets, in set-top boxes, and in LCD HDTVs, it seems like the Linux-based OS could end up dominating the entire non-PC consumer device operating system space. What do Slashdot readers think: Is resistance futile?"
Is resistance necessary?
And people with jobs actually working with data. I work in local government. Call me crazy, but I just don't see a future where our permitting clerks are sitting at the counter entering new permits and printing invoices from a phone screen. I don't see us entering tax payments on that either. The same applies to most existing industry.
Now, those devices certainly DO have uses. For instance, we have building inspectors that I'd LOVE to setup with touch screen phones or pads so that they could do inspections in the field and upload the results back. Same with property appraisers and possibly even our EMS people.
You have to stop trying to look at it as one technology "winning out" over the other. The simple fact is that for a ton of things the desktop is a better UI. For a ton of other things handheld touch devices are. If you try to shoehorn either into working in all situations, you're going to end up being terrible in many situations.
Consider it this way: a wrench works pretty poorly for driving nails. You can make it work, but it's aggravating. Once you finally get a hammer, everything might start looking like a nail for a while, but realistically, there are still a lot of things you're going to need that old wrench for - don't throw it out.
The desktop will continue to be relevant for decades - quite possibly for as long as we have a technological future. The only change is that it won't be the ONLY thing that's relevant anymore.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Are we sure we want Android taking over all of that? I don't. I think a single OS dominating is a bad idea - like growing nothing but potatoes. I'd like to see Android doing SOME of that.
...this "either/or" mentality. That if Android succeeds, everyone else has failed.
Let's look at computers. Microsoft and OEM's that use Windows have about 90% market-share, while Apple and OS X has a bit under 10%. Does that mean that Apple has "failed"? Not really. They seem to be having highly succesful computer-business, happy users, and lots of profits. Apple earns more money on their computers than HP, the market-leader, does with theirs. yet for some reason some people say that Apple should be like HP and Dell, since licensing OS from someone else is "the way this business works". Even though it seems that the OEM's are not earning that much, while Intel and Microsoft are the companies that reap the profits.
If we look at phones, we can see that Apple is earning lots of money there as well. More than Nokia is earning, even though Apple is a lot smaller. It seems that people are expecting Apple to gain iPod-like dominance in the phone-business, and if/when Android overtakes iOS, people decide that iOS has "failed", since history did not repeat itself. Well, Symbian dwarfs both iOS and Android, yet no-one is calling iOS or Android failures because of that fact. And gaining iPod-like share in a mature market like phones is quite hard, if not impossible. When Nokia was at it's biggest, it had something like 60-70% share of the market. But that was a market that wasn't all that mature yet. and they managed that for only few years.
What if Android gets 50% share in few years? Great! Android is a good OS, and we need more good phones. does that mean that everyone else has failed? I don't think so. It seems that people have this strange idea that there must be a clear winner and a clear loser(s). We got that in computers, when Microsoft ended up dominating the market. So we MUST have something similar elsewhere as well, right? I don't think so. And even in computers the "niche player" is earning quite nice profits. Even though they have single-digits market-share does not seem to be hurting them. You do not need to be big, biggest or dominating in order to have a good business.
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2-for-1 specials are basically equivalent to selling at half the price. Being overpriced compared to the competition is no virtue, though I can understand how Apple fans would see it that way (or, rather, I can see how people who see it that way would tend to become Apple fans.)