Here\u2019s how it could have been.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t have a duopoly on mobile phones. We have four players \u2013Microsoft, Apple, Google, RIM and they roughly each have a quarter of the market.<\/p>\n
Facebook doesn\u2019t become as big, as the four players tell FB to be quiet with its ad business on mobile. FB can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Google doesn\u2019t become as obnoxiously big because EVERYONE is competing with Google on everything. Google can\u2019t force-feed Chrome or make its services run badly on other platforms because, well, competition. Every single happy customer is important.<\/p>\n
What we customers gain is likely way less surveillance: it\u2019s a lot harder to make four, very different companies agree on not caring about privacy, especially when the business isn\u2019t about gathering user data but is simply about selling devices and software.<\/p>\n
Maybe this way freemium doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t take 30%, but 10%, maybe less (competition, remember?).<\/p>\n
Developers would have to build different versions of their apps, exactly like they\u2019re doing with a duopoly (it\u2019s always been the holy grail: code once, deploy everywhere except that it\u2019s never been the case and probably never will). The difference would be that they would have a lot more independence and would actually own<\/em> platforms.<\/p>\n What we\u2019d also gain is a slower technological pace: because phones wouldn\u2019t have been subsidized by carriers (remember, this is why the iPhone won), and that they cost so much, we\u2019d be using them on a 5-year average instead of 18 months. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Instead we\u2019re stuck in two walled gardens which increasingly are trying to make us even more dependent on.<\/p>\n We suck at capitalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here\u2019s how it could have been. We don\u2019t have a duopoly on mobile phones. We have four players \u2013Microsoft, Apple, Google, RIM and they roughly each have a quarter of the market. Facebook doesn\u2019t become as big, as the four players tell FB to be quiet with its ad business on mobile. FB can\u2019t side […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3319"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3319"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3320,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3319\/revisions\/3320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}