This is why competition is good
You know it turns out monopolies are bad, when customers have no where else to go what incentive does a company have to do anything good? Look no further than the telcos or the cable cos to see proof of this.
Intel, the “tel” part of the wintel monopoly has been terrible. Easily as bad as the “win” part of the monopoly yet escaping most of the hating that Microsoft received. They ruthlessly crushed any competitors that rose up against their desktop x86 chips - competitors always arising in the low end of that market, Intel would flood the market with cut rate low end chips until the competitors ran out of money. Intel had the luxury because they had the fat margins on their high end chips to cushion the pain - something their competitors never had.
Never, that is, until AMD finally hit the scene and moved up into the high end. There they combined good chips with not making any mistakes pressuring Intel across the board and for a brief shining moment surpassing Intel’s products across all AMD’s offerings. Intel was saddled with a bad architecture and heavy inertia from their long complete dominance of the desktop chip market and AMD was nimble and hungry. Remember Opteron v. Itanium? Good times.
Well, it took some years but Intel’s been slowly waking up and remembering what it is to be an engineering company that has to actually do something to earn it’s keep. And, wow, I guess they just finally yawned, stretched and hit the ground running. By all accounts their new Penryn processor family seems high tech in all the right ways - faster, built on smaller parts and more energy efficient these chips seem well ahead of AMD’s offerings.
Hopefully AMD has it in them to kick into extra high gear and fire back with something else great. True competition is a great thing.
On another front is the Android SDK. I recently posted how unimpressed I was with that whole Open Handset Alliance. Well, they’ve released the Android SDK and some vids just like they promised. I looked through them, read some stuff on the internet and overall I admit to being more optimistic than I was (no hard feat) but still skeptical of it’s success.
I took a look at some screen shots and found it looked OK, nothing overly exciting (and the testbed handset looked like the bastard child of a Centro and a new iPod Nano). It’s cool that it offers some OpenGL and some of the demo looked impressive. It didn’t seem to offer multitouch which is a bummer but maybe I just missed it.
Since I’m not a mobile app developer I have no means of knowing what’s cool or not about the API - it seems good that they have that XML layout maker, but who knows. What I am most interested in which I haven’t gotten a sense of yet is the coherency of the interface and uniformity of application UI elements. These are things that the iPhone does quite well and will make or break a consumer device.
My hope is that I’m wrong about Android and it’s alliance. If Q4 2008 rolls around and a range of low and high end phones rolls out with a broad developer base and a great UI that would be the best I can hope for. As it is, I wonder if the release of this open api makes Apple feel any pressure to make the iPhone more of an open platform. Right now Apple has all the momentum, developers are chomping at the bit to build on the platform and websites everywhere are customizing their sites for the iPhone (have you tried fandango.com recently on the iPhone? Awesome. Totally awesome). If the SDK rolls around and proves to be available to only a select few, I suspect that the developer backlash against Apple will be non-trivial especially with Android an easy download away.
The big question is whether Apple considers Android competition or not at this stage. It’s a vaporous entity - with handsets at least a year away can they actually get developers working on this? Will they seed reference hardware to the developer base sometime early next year? When the phones do come out will the carriers have hobbled their Androids so much that it won’t matter?
There’s a lot of question marks about Android, in my mind. The interesting thing is that Android seems meant to compete across the whole handset market from low end dumb phones to high end smart phones. I suspect that Apple has aspirations to compete across more of the spectrum than just the top end that the iPhone sits on now. So despite the non-existence of any OHA hardware and the existence only of this “early-look SDK” - Apple’s most likely at least a little worried about it. And that’s a big plus in my book.
Competition. It does a body good.
