Here’s how it could have been.
We don’t have a duopoly on mobile phones. We have four players –Microsoft, Apple, Google, RIM and they roughly each have a quarter of the market.
Facebook doesn’t become as big, as the four players tell FB to be quiet with its ad business on mobile. FB can’t side with Google on this and Apple is busy competing instead of making deals with Internet companies. FB would likely have had way less power. Quite possibly, IG stays independent.
Google doesn’t become as obnoxiously big because EVERYONE is competing with Google on everything. Google can’t force-feed Chrome or make its services run badly on other platforms because, well, competition. Every single happy customer is important.
What we customers gain is likely way less surveillance: it’s a lot harder to make four, very different companies agree on not caring about privacy, especially when the business isn’t about gathering user data but is simply about selling devices and software.
Maybe this way freemium doesn’t become the de-facto business model because tons of developers make a living doing the incredible thing of selling their apps on markets where platforms don’t take 30%, but 10%, maybe less (competition, remember?).
Developers would have to build different versions of their apps, exactly like they’re doing with a duopoly (it’s always been the holy grail: code once, deploy everywhere except that it’s never been the case and probably never will). The difference would be that they would have a lot more independence and would actually own platforms.
What we’d also gain is a slower technological pace: because phones wouldn’t have been subsidized by carriers (remember, this is why the iPhone won), and that they cost so much, we’d be using them on a 5-year average instead of 18 months.
At the scale of the world and billions of devices, it is not hard to see the gains in terms of environmental waste and rare metal mining.
Those four companies would have to work together to make a few things happen smoothly. Like sim card, contact, pictures and videos transfer between devices. Interoperability would be QUEEN and that would be very nice for us, customers. No lock-in. Free.
Instead we’re stuck in two walled gardens which increasingly are trying to make us even more dependent on.
We suck at capitalism.