No I am not talking about British occupation of India and Burma ,, my horizon is only last 25 yrs of computing industry..
Up until early last year , I pretty much convinced myself that the war in OS space is over.. Microsoft got the round .. story has been told and stage closed. Why the hell these geeks keep on coming back with new distributions of Linux every other day , why is Apple hell bent on raring "Tigers" and "Leopards".. Jungle already has a king.... why don't they (gracefully) accept their defeat and focus on something that really adds value for the end users rather than confusing them with more OS options .. who really cares what OS you are running and why should one ?
.. How wrong I was !!
The shift of computing focus from PC to Mobile phone , has opened the old stage once again. New" Show" is on and there are new players this time. Palm , Nokia and Blackberry. Apple is back with iPhone. This is pretty much the same as the shift from mainframe to PC. The new device had opened up many opportunities at OS level that biggies like IBM, HP and Sun failed to understand and capitalize. The difference this time, however, is Microsoft does understand this shift and is not willing the make the mistake that IBM did. And Google is there to compete and give them a run for their money .. with Android.
I think there are two categories of players in the race for OS space on mobile . First being the hardware distributors who are focussed to develop OS specifically for their devices. Blackberry and Nokia are the front runners with very interesting strategies. Palm ,despite being the pioneer, is loosing both focus and steam. Apple is a late entry but a very compelling case (as usual) . And yesterday only I heard Garmin is launching its own platform in Nuviphone..a native GPS device doubled up in a phone/camera. Another key player can be Asus with ePC leading the best sellers charts at Amazon. They still don't have the traditional phone "in built" in the ePC but the wi fi lets you talk thru Skype and gtalk .. I would like to draw a parallel to this with IBM , Apple and Sun of PC era who focussed on their device specific OSs. The way old PC suppliers based their OSs on Unix , most of the new cell phone manufacturers are driving their base OS from Linux (Nokia, Asus, Sony Erricson)
Second category are the likes of Microsoft who focussed only on OS and made it available to different manufacturers/ architectures in PC age , at a lower cost then their own OSs . For Mobile market , Microsoft is doing the same trick. They want "Palms" and "Samsungs" of mobile world running Windows Mobile . Once again Microsoft Mantra is " Take my OS (cheap), focus on your things (hardware) and let me drive the value chain thru integration with third parties."....... Smart haan ... Unfortunately this time there is Google to spoil the party. I was so happy to notice that Google wasn't carried away to get their own handset out (despite market pressures) and opted for a hardware independent development strategy with Android. Microsoft obviously has an advantage here but then Google always surprises analysts. I am hoping Android will not get distracted like "Netware" of old times.
Needless to say , if history really repeats itself, device specific OS guys will once again give in to device independent OS players. That means Microsoft or Google will drive the value chain of Mobile market in coming times. Given the rate of change , the coming times are NOT in decades (as happened for PC market to stabilize). Its in years. I would forecast next two years will hint us as to who will take this round and max 5 yrs will give us a new leader "Value Integrator" in mobile space.
Is there a role for IBM , Sun and HP in this new act ? I guess not . So far they are appearing too bloated to address this nimble act of speed and style. Can they really do something ? I guess YES. They have the resources to and tools to give this world a free , non evil and future proof platform .. question is "How sleek and How fast "
I think the race is once again is wide open ..... May the best player win :-)))
