A couple of weeks ago, Google and Verizon announced a partnership to co-develop a series of phones based on Google’s Android platform. Just this weekend, a marketing campaign attacking the Apple iPhone was launched promoting the Verizon “Droid”. Thus, many are prognosticating, the opening salvos been fired in the first serious competitive threat to the iPhone.
There are many, many articles on the web that talk about nearly every angle of this topic ad nauseum. So I won’t rehash any of those articles. For me, what this “battle” will come down to is which business model resonates with the market better. The iPhone model: where Apple has tight control over the entire platform from hardware to software. Or the Android model: in which Google develops the software platform and leaves it up to other vendors to implement the hardware.
Up to this point, the iPhone has succeeded exactly because Apple was able to develop a device they had total control over, resulting in a very easy to use product that brought smartphone features to the average user. It will be interesting to see if Google’s model of more open development will result in devices that are as slick or polished, are as easy to use, and that will create the type of affection among its users that the iPhone has. It will be this, not tech specs or marketing campaigns, that will determine which smartphone will be the dominant player for the next several years.
