Winning the Mobile Platform Race

• June 21, 2011
• 9 notes

I’m not much of a racing fan, so forgive me if the analogy breaks down rather quickly, but it struck me today that Apple’s disciplined approach to building its mobile platform looks somewhat like a well managed racing team. While competitors have been taking risks and cutting corners in an attempt to catch up, Apple has been meticulously preparing for the race ahead.

RIM bolted a spoiler and painted some racing stripes on a dated car with a winning pedigree. Without a major overhaul in recent memory, the car’s age and sustained abuse have become more and more apparent as competitors shift into second gear. What was a very strong lead early in the mobile platform race has been completely squandered. They did go out and buy another car, but it also needed an overhaul and they didn’t have the patience to finish before tossing it into the race. After an embarrassing crash and burn they’re still pushing ahead, but RIM needs much more than a quick pit stop at this point.

At just the right time, Palm abandoned its old, crufty car and built a new one from the ground up. The car looks amazing on the outside, but their new engine just hasn’t delivered. With time and lots of tweaks the engine should perform well, but Palm didn’t have the cash to stay in the race long enough to get the car firing on all cylinders. Just when things were looking most dire, HP swooped in and bought the car—racing team and all. HP’s cash, branding, distribution, and other strengths may well keep the car in the race, but it will likely take another year or two for the car itself to perform optimally and by then who know where the competition will be.

Microsoft initially didn’t understand that the rules of the race had fundamentally changed and expected the new competition to crash and burn. As others picked up speed Microsoft tried the racing stripes and spoiler approach but soon had the good sense to scrap their old clunker. The new car shows lots of promise, but started so far behind it’s going to take a herculean effort to catch up. With deep pockets, determination, and decades of platform building experience, Microsoft is just the sort of company able to mount a herculean effort, but I’m still not convinced they fully understand the race they’re now in.

Google looks to have a great car in the race, but they’re forgoing tire changes, routine maintenance, and timely fill ups to try and catch Apple. They’re making up ground and things look great from the grandstands, but it’s only a matter of time before a long pit stop or two kills their momentum.

The other analogies are a bit of a stretch, but I really do think we’re in the midst of Google’s first major pit stop. They admittedly rushed Honeycomb to market and are now having to fix things that would have best been done right the first time. They have a strong, well funded pit crew and may be able to get back in the race quickly, but the floundering of Honeycomb based tablets and slow growth in 3rd party tablet apps don’t bode well.

The next major pit stop for Android may be the elimination of physical buttons. Rumors have been floating around that the next Google phone (Nexus 4G?) wont have Android’s current physical buttons. If true, I’m very curious to see how the buttons are emulated and/or eliminated in software. Will all existing apps need to be updated? Will Ice Cream Sandwich automagically work on devices that have buttons just as well as those without? Will the transition confuse and frustrate users?

The Android team has proven itself able to iterate on features like Cut/Copy/Paste on the fly, but something as fundamental as removing the physical buttons may prove to be a slow, painful pitstop. And if not the physical buttons, who knows what other legacy implementation or hastily coded API may send the pit crew scrambling.

Google may well mitigate any major technical hurdles, but there’s still the threat that other corners they cut along the way will come back to haunt them. Oracle has presented a very strong case that Google “knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property”. It’s rather ironic that a dispute over “open” technologies may be Android’s biggest challenge.

Apple, on the other hand, had the luxury of defining this entire category and many of its fundamental concepts years before some other platforms had a single line of code written. Apple’s car then is a stripped down, painstakingly rebuilt piece of engineering art based on decades of hard-won race experience. They didn’t start with a clunker in OSX, but they still had enough of a lead on the competition to carefully consider the strengths and weaknesses of OSX and build iOS on a solid foundation.

iOS is by no means perfect, and Apple has and will continue to make pit stops along the way, but that’s actually my point—Apple’s disciplined approach to iterating on iOS and its OSX underpinnings allows them to take productive, well-timed pit stops while the competition continues to scramble and take on undue risk. As John Gruber put it: “This is how Apple rolls — steady, relentless, incremental progress.”