This is good in theory, but not in reality. How is it that Microsoft
gets a huge premium for its Office suite when comparable office suite is
available free (to share and free of cost). While the case is black and
white in case of office, where we have a proprietary software as the
leader, what about Android - where another large company is able to
dominate the android development system. So is android 'free'? even if
the code is available for all purposes, what about the role of google in
shaping its course?
Big corporations can use variety of methods to dominate the market and
drown out the efforts of others. Such large monopolies/oligopolies is
far more common in the IT sector than in any other. And their
domination distorts the market so much that it is meaningless to
believe that since anyone/everyone can enter the market, monopolies
cant happen.
see
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-04-02/tech/30089528_1_android-phones-google-s-android-smartphone-market
Google's Android OS has gained an astonishing 7 points of market share
in the US smartphone market in the past three months, Comscore says.
RIM's market share over the same period collapsed, dropping almost 5
points. Apple's iPhone share increased slightly, but is dead in the
water and has now fallen way behind Android (in smartphones)......
Why do the Android gains matter? Are Apple bulls right that Apple has an
insurmountable hold on the "premium" segment of the market and that it
doesn't matter who has the other 75%? *The Android gains matter because
technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant
platform (see Windows in PCs, Facebook in social, Google in search). And
the more dominant the platform becomes, the more valuable it becomes and
the harder it becomes to dislodge. The network effect kicks in, and
developers building products designed to work with the platform devote
more and more of their energy to the platform. The reward for building
and working with other platforms, meanwhile, drops, and gradually
developers stop developing for them.
*
Importantly, it's not a question of which platform is "better." (This is
irrelevant.) It's a question of which platform everyone else uses. And
increasingly, in the smartphone market, barring a radical change in
trend, that's Android.
So that's why Android's gains matter. And, yes, Apple fans should be
scared to death about them. Apple is fighting a very similar war to the
one it fought--and lost--in the 1990s. It is trying to build the best
integrated products, hardware and software, and maintain complete
control over the ecosystem around them. This end-to-end control makes it
easier for Apple to build products that are "better," but it makes it
much harder for the company to compete against a software platform that
is standard across many hardware manufacturers (Windows in the 1990s,
Android now). As we explain here, two important things are different
about the current Android - iPhone battle than the Mac - Windows war in
the 1990s. First, Apple is maintaining price parity (or better) with the
leading Android phones. (Macs always cost more than PCs). Second,
Android is still a fragmented platform, which significantly reduces the
benefits of "interoperability" across multiple manufacturers.
*
Google is working to fix the second problem, though--enacting much
tighter rules about how Android can be used. And if the platform is to
become dominant and ubiquitous, it will likely continue to tighten these
rules.*
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