lalcan said:
Am i the only one to see the heavy hand of M$ twisting carrier's arms to offer those aweful "smartphones" instead of iTunes-moto mobile?
You all know in the old days M$ menaced PC companies to either sell OS/2 and pay premium price for Windows or drop OS/2 and receive Windows for a VERY small price, you all also know how it turned out. That was the day i realized how a screaming minority can actually push a silent mayority into the dark path.
Be aware, be very aware.
Oh, they're
very aware, which is why Intel and Microsoft have made so little inroads to date in controlling the cell phone market the way they do PCs. They don't call the shots in the cell phone market, the carriers do. Windows Mobile (or whatever they're calling it this year...) only runs in a relative handful of high-end smart phones, and the carriers offer them because they see a market for them. Same thing with Blackberry. Same thing with Palm. All are overshadowed in marketshare by Symbian-based phones, and we're still only talking about the smart phones, a small, expensive (but high-margin) niche market. The vast majority of low- to mid-range cell phones still run various proprietary, well-entrenched operating systems, or, more recently, Linux variants. PC manufacturers originally got locked into using Microsoft because they really had
no viable alternatives (i.e., they wouldn't run popular MS-DOS and Windows-based productivity applications, or games) prior to Linux (remember, Apple hasn't licensed for quite a while now). This is far from the case with cell phones at this time.
As far as hardware goes, Freescale (formerly Motorola's semiconductor arm), Nokia, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and others supply the bulk of the CPU/DSP chips in use in cell phones. Intel's a newcomer to the market for these. I think the only cell phone I've seen to date that actually had an Intel CPU was a Windows smartphone -- what a surprise. Intel's going to have to make it worth the cell phone manufacturers' while to scrap their existing developmental and manufacturing infrastructures to change architectures, and you can bet the other CPU/DSP vendors aren't going to take it lying down.
I'm
far more concerned about which DRM scheme/file format will dominate among the carriers for online cell phone music stores. This is the reason Apple made an alliance with Motorola so early in the game. The problem is that it's the carriers that really call the shots these days; they're simply not going to buy a phone (or a phone feature) today that doesn't contribute to their bottom line somehow. Google a bit for the V710 Verizon bluetooth crippling class action suit to get an idea of how far this has already gone. If Microsoft's Janus DRM for WMA gains a foothold with the carriers, that's potentially a bigger problem for Apple than Windows smartphones ever will be, because the DRM can be platform agnostic. The iTMS could be shut out by carriers who only want to deal with Microsoft's DRM -- or are
given a deal on it, initially. It wouldn't be the first time Microsoft's used a loss-leader strategy to gain marketshare.
