[OT] mobile rising

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 14:42:41 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Do you blame them, given such anti-competitive measures long 
> undertaken by MS and Apple?

Big businesses do what they can get away with. Once upon a time 
governments cared about anti-trust (E.g. AT&T and IBM), but 
nowadays it seems like they don't care much about enabling 
competition where smaller players get a shot. Governments seem to 
let the big multi-national corporations do what they want. It's 
not like MS was punished much for their behaviour…

(EU has mounted a little bit of resistance, but only thanks to 
individuals.)

> There is some truth to this, but if you cannot compete with a 
> free product- cough, cough, Windows Mobile- I don't know what 
> to tell you.

I actually think the Microsoft phones looked quite appealing, but 
I didn't get the sense that Microsoft would back it up over time. 
Perception is king. Google had the same problem with Dart. They 
kept developing Dart, but after they announced that it didn't get 
into Chrome, many started to wonder if that was the beginning of 
the end.

>  In other words, google cannot afford to spend a fraction of 
> the money on Android that Apple spends on iOS, because google 
> makes so little money off of Android by comparison, so there 
> are disadvantages to their free model too.

As far as I can tell from the iOS APIs the internals doesn't seem 
to change all that much anymore. I'm sure they do a lot on 
hardware, drivers and tooling.

> As I said earlier, the mobile OS story is not over yet, there 
> are more changes to come.

Yes, that probably is true. The teenager/young adults segment can 
shift things real fast if someone push out a perfect mobile 
gaming-device.