That's incredibly oversimplified.
Apple came out with the Mac, wowwed a computing world that was knee-deep in PCs and the DOS command line interface. Apple famously turned their noses up at that and insisted that Mac hardware was the only way to go. Microsoft came along and had the brilliant idea of slapping a Mac-like UI on DOS and instantly brought all those customers into the GUI age with minimal effort. Almost overnight, Microsoft had an instant customer base for their new OS. Whether you like MS or not, it was a genius move and a kind of lock-in. People didn't have to give up all that legacy DOS software but could move into the modern era without jumping to the Mac. Masterful move by Gates and Co.
The Macintosh did not "wow" the computer world. PC users liked their MS-DOS. Which of course, was a Microsoft product. The Macintosh was "too easy to use". PC users loved their command line interface. Made them feel clever. The Macintosh wasn't a real computer, they argued. At this point the market was much smaller, narrower and the users tended to be geekier. The Mac was seen as a "toy". They laughed at the mouse. IT departments loved the PC and MS-DOS because it made them feel superior and gave them lots of work. Harder to set up and harder to use. The Macintosh was slower because of the overheads imposed by the GUI. PC users said, okay, our screens look like crap and, no, we don't have What You See Is What You Get, but damn! look at how fast it is. If you need to do a very specific task like word processing and spreadsheets, the PC was f-ugly but damn efficient. And PCs were much cheaper than Macs. Most PC users didn't give up DOS and move to Windows until Windows 95. PCs just had so more software and, very importantly, way more games.
I do agree with you on a lot of your points. The phone market is much more fluid. Apple vs. IBM was the battle for a "standard". The argument went, well, even if the Macintosh is better, life would be much easier if we all just used the same thing. There were real issues of "compatibility" because most tasks were disk-based. It took Apple a long time to come around to making Macs capable of reading PC disks transparently. Exchanging files at first was a real problem. Phones are different because there's simply no compelling reason why we should all use the same thing. There are simply more cross-platform standards. People can jump ship from one to the other and the market is really fluid. The race for market share is bogus.
Apple has never dominated the personal computer market. There's this myth about that it was "ahead" in some way in the 80s. The IBM-PC running DOS and the clones (and increasingly the clones) dominated the 80s. Microsoft supplied the OS software. And they didn't give it away for free. When Windows 95 eventually came along, they used their advantage as developers of the OS to establish Word and Excel as the standard word processor and spreadsheet programs for the PC. You got your hardware nice and cheap, but Microsoft ended up with a monopoly on much of the software and a license to print their own money. Cheap hardware can be a Trojan Horse.
Apple dismissed the race for market share and decided to opt for retaining the profits on the hardware. And in the long-term that strategy has worked very well for them. So much so that other companies are looking to emulate their business model. Market share means jack if you're not making money. Samsung gets it. It's marketing its more expensive phones aggressively and it's playing Apple at its own game. It's going for brand recognition and establishing itself as another premium brand. The question now is will Google blunder in, loss lead its own branded hardware in the interests of gaining as much market share as possible (to what end it's very hard to fathom
) and eventually work against this very successful strategy?
History simply doesn't repeat itself. You can learn from history but you have to go back and look at all the smaller factors that made that situation very unique. The dominance of the PC was driven by the fact that IT departments in business made the buying decisions and at home, people wanted to play games. The PC had definite advantages for both these markets and the hardware was so much cheaper. Playing for market share is simply not enough these days. To what end? To what advantage? Just because the clones won, or Microsoft won, or whatever, because they gained the largest market share, it doesn't follow that Google should be hell bent on market share
at any cost.
And when do we say it's finished? And there's a winner? The race is still on and Apple's doing quite nicely. It's world-wide market share in PCs is declining and declining and declining... But it's actually selling more Macs than ever before. Way, way, way, more than it did in the 80s. The market is just so much bigger these days. The whole market share preoccupation is a steaming pile of crap, really.