As businesspeople, we’re obsessed with answering the question: who’s going to win? It’s a natural tendency since it can be very expensive to pick the wrong horse. Unfortunately, the current vogue of comparing smartphones strictly on features may lead marketers to compare devices when they should be surveying the ecosystem they inhabit.
So let’s turn our attention from the impressive horse above to the humble vole.
Research scientists at Purdue tell us the 60 species within the vole genus Microtus are evolving 60 to 100 times faster than the average vertebrate. Given the chance to evolve 60 times faster than my competitors, I’d say “yes, thank you very much, I think I will.”
So what does this have to do with smartphones? Today most observers are comparing the features, look, feel and application store depth of the iPhone and Motorola’s new Droid with the fervor of the English and the French insulting each other in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
In the bigger picture, it’s not the device in particular that’s going to win or lose the race. Read those comparison reviews again: some aspects of each device are lacking or irritating, but the feature set of both are quite robust.
“It’s the ecosystem, stupid”: open systems are coming of age. Platforms like Twitter invite innovation, from the invention of a now-commonplace meme like retweeting to new applications create using Twitter’s API.
Yes, open systems tend to produce nine inelegant solutions for each gem. No, the open system can never be as elegant as the closed can be.
But if you believe crowdsourcing and citizen developers are the waves of the future, a closed system won’t be the right ecosystem for every application.
Soon, sophisticated marketers will say “Yes, this Droid is very much my personal preference. But to best reach our target market for this client, we went with an iPhone app.” Or, conversely, “I love my iPhone! Personally, I wouldn’t want any other smartphone. But since this project called for multiple, open hardware platforms, we’re using Android.”
What smart businesspeople won’t say is “One size fits all.”
