The Pontiflex Blog

Today, HP acquired Palm for $1.2 billion, breathing new life into the company and its innovative Web OS operating platform. With this acquisition, the mobile industry will continue to have one more operating system vying for leadership in a crowded arena. Today, the playing field includes Apple’s OS 4, Google’s Android, Palm’s Web OS, Blackberry and Windows Mobile, among many other players.

This diversity is good for the mobile industry. It makes the space refreshingly different from the desktop market that is largely dominated by the omnipresent Windows operating system (estimated market share as of October 2009: 91%).
Birds and animals. Snakes and spiders. Deers and wolves. With its ability to encourage competition and symbiosis, diversity is essential for any ecosystem looking to thrive and evolve. For the mobile industry, the existing diversity carries significant advantages:

1. Security: In 2009, the Conficker worm infected 15 million computers worldwide in a matter of days. This rapid spread would not have been possible if there were multiple operating systems (with greater than 5% market share).

Unity in Diversity. That’s all good. But equally comfortingly, there’s also security in diversity. Competitive markets have a number of variables at each layer. This makes it difficult for a single worm (or superworm) to infiltrate a significant portion of them.

2. Exchange of features: In their early days, the Beatles were inspired from the Blues singers. Quentin Tarantino drew on his inspirations from other movies for Pulp Fiction. The new Google phones will include multitouch features seen to date only on iPhones. The Apple iPhone OS 4 includes a multitasking feature that was already there on other operating systems (including the Palm). Beg, borrow, steal. Innovation thrives and the end consumer is the winner.

3. Competition is good for the consumer: While this is not the appropriate forum to get into the benefits and evils of extreme capitalism (especially at a time when the Wall Street bull leaps with fear at the slightest sound like a startled hare), it is fair to say that competition is good for the consumer. The competition in the mobile space has already introduced a dizzying array of features that start with the simple Copy and Paste and stop just short of curing the common cold.

There’s an age old argument that homogeneity is desirable since all developers can work off a single platform. The slow pace of innovation in the PC industry is a clear rebuttal of this sentiment. Even if there’s a need for standardization, it doesn’t have to occur under the iron fist of one company. Rather they can work under the auspices of international standard bodies like the w3C, which provides a common developmental framework for the HTML 5.

Before getting carried away at the prospects for the mobile market, it is worthwhile remembering that the early days of the PC industry were dominated by multiple operating systems (Apple, IBM, Commodore and many others). They vanished faster than a bit of data being devoured by a worm. Hopefully this story will have a happier ending. The diversity in the mobile space will benefit the consumer. It will also benefit the different industry players – Apple, HP, Google and yes, even a certain Microsoft.