[su_quote] The Android ecosystem today is superficially similar to the PC ecosystem, but I’d suggest that the clarity and alignment of interests of the PC ecosystem isn’t present in anything like the same way. As an Android OEM you have very little idea what Android will be in 3 years – partly because Google itself may not have a fully-formed idea. There certainly aren’t public roadmaps stretching out years in advance.
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Finally, Google‘s control of Android itself is a question. Amazon forked it, but with limited broader effects. Almost all Android in China lacks Google services but then Google is largely absent from China anyway. The ways that forks of Android might become relevant outside China (and Google’s tools for preventing this) are complex and a topic for another post, but we can’t rule this out. Indeed, a lot of the most interesting ecosystem innovation is being done on top of Android rather than as a would-be competitor to it.[/su_quote]
This follows Tim Cook’s comment that Google’s Android dominance in the smartphone market cannot be compare with Microsoft’s Windows dominance in the PC market:
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I don’t view it that way. There are several reasons. If you look back at the Mac/Windows battle that was going on at the time, you’d find that one of the things that was the catalyst for separating Mac from Windows share was applications. There was a vast, vast difference in the number of applications that was available for the Macintosh than what was available on Windows. Over time, that gap grew and grew and grew. And in fact, the Mac began to lose some key applications. We have over a million apps on iOS. We have over half-million that have been optimized for iPad. That half-million compares to 1,000 for Android tablets. That’s one of the reasons, although not the only reason, why the experience on Android tablets is so crappy because the app is nothing more than a stretched out smartphone app.
The other thing is that Windows pretty much was one thing. Android is like Europe. Europe was a name that somebody came up with for Americans who didn’t understand that Europe was a lot of countries that weren’t like U.S. states. They were very different. Android is many things. How many people who use a Kindle know that they’re using Android? And you see what Samsung is doing by putting more and more software on top. I think it’s night and day. The compare is so off.
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