What lesson should he have learned, exactly? I think rather that he has taught us a big lesson of late -- open or not, if you create a compelling product, people will break down your doors and line up for hours in order to get it.
You have to keep in mind that the app store was a response to people jail breaking the iphone and installing 3rd party apps. Apple never wanted developers messing with it's precious device but they finally gave and look what happened.
I'm not so sure. The only thing Apple is dominant at right now are mp3 players, and to my knowledge those don't/can't compete against any sort of open platform. There's no question that their computer sales are doing pretty well, and that quality sells, but they're still far from dominant.
Why isn't an open source mp3 player winning against the iPod?
Customers don't care if things are open or not. Unless android is put on drop dead sexy phones with killer features, it'll fail.
The end user doesn't care about openness directly, just as they didn't care about it in the case of Windows vs. Mac or internet vs. AOL. It's the benefits of openness they care about.
In the case of cell phones, the benefits are large and obvious. In the case of mp3 players I can't think of any.
They cared in the case of AOL vs internet, because AOL completely sucked.
Similarly, a growing number care in the case of Windows vs Mac/Linux, because Windows is so awful.
Is the iPhone, or other smartphone for that matter broken enough to cause pain to users?
I don't know, you could be right, but I don't see the problem that gets solved by Android right now for the average user.
Windows didn't take over the market because Mac OS sucked. It won because it allowed scores of OEMs to make all sorts of computers targeted at all sorts of consumers.
That's the same with the iPhone. Believe it or not, a lot of people hate AT&T. Or they have family on Verizon, and get free minutes when talking to them, so they sign up with Verizon. Or Sprint or T-mobile or whoever else. Or they get 15% off from work.
No matter how great the iPhone is, being tethered to AT&T means that >2/3 of customers won't even consider it. What this means is that Android, by being on whichever carriers want it, immediately appeals to at least 2x the number of customers. It could be significantly less good than the iPhone, and it will still sell more.
Then there's the form factors. It might be hard to believe, but most people just want to talk on their phone. Android can be on a cheap-ass clamshell. People with cheap-ass clamshells might still want to check the weather, play simple games, etc, so there will still be a market for apps there.
A lot of people use their mobile for business. They care about call quality, battery life, and a keypad, all things the iPhone sucks at. Those people will, on whichever carrier their company has a deal with, have Android phones available to them that fit that needs. (No idea if any will make inroads on Blackberry though.)
The iPhone has Apple/AT&T's marketing budget. Android has Google, a bunch of OEMs, and a bunch of carriers.
Put Android on something like the iPod Touch with GPS and advanced IM apps, and you could get middle school and high school kids hooked on this, especially if the rates could undercut cell phones by a factor of 2 or 3. (Which would be easy to do.)
By advanced IM apps, I meant something that could get connectivity through Wimax or EVDO. As for getting them hooked, if you remember awhile back, kids were heavily into pagers. IM style communication integrated with GPS that they'd get with a music player (which they need anyhow) might create a similar trend with middle school kids.
Android wouldn't be necessary, but that would bring an open App development ecosystem with it, which would be great.
Pagers died out long ago here too. The point is: there was once a trend among youth where alternative cheap communications was used in place of the cell phone.
If that can happen once, it can happen again. And SMS price structure is bloated. Things are ripe for a change.
