Android > Symbian MSFT OSX etcetc. Apple doomed.

Ultimi Barbarorum: Do Androids Dream of Apple-Blackberry Crumble?

So here’s a post about something micro: I think Apple has blown it in the handset market, and the collapse is coming soon. You will recall my (rather insane and obsessed) contention that the iPhone may well blow Apple up, but was and is the only way they have to play a weak hand. Also, subsequently, my admiration of the actual phone, their amazing initial sales and my guess that Apple had a window to build scale in handset markets. Well, they did precisely nothing with their window and now, I suspect, it has closed. They may be toast. Except they and their fanboy analysts don’t know it yet.

I decided about five years ago that what happened to PCs when the IBM-PC came out would happen to cells. Anyone remember trash-80s? The CP/M operating system? Altair? Imsai?

If ATT hadn't retarded the spread of Unix by ten years or so by dog-in-the-mangering it via their license, MSFT would either be nothing or much less than they are. I was using an X-windows precursor and Unix on a machine with 512K of ram clocking at about 1MHz back in the early 1980s. I figured that what with Stallman's GNU and Linux finally having freed Unix, the commoditized standard-architecture cells would be running some Unix variant (that's what OSX is: BSD Unix on top of the Mach Microkernel with a nice GUI on top, the latter being Apple's claim to fame, aside from basically hijacking some open source [which the GPL license GNU and Linux have should prevent]).

I've got a G1. It is basically an ugly prototype. The software is what counts. I put the 1.1 upgrade on it and the progress is impressive, and I expect that to accelerate as interest grows.

Symbian, one of the ugliest messes I've run across, is dead dead dead. Palm has seen the writing and is apparently switching to some kind of Linux. MSFT being basically like a cockroach, their crap will be hard to eliminate, but I think in five or so years cells running anything other than a Unix variant (or maybe Haiku or some other upcoming free software OS) will be have already been history for a year or so.

[Update] More signs of doom for AAPL and MSFT:

Nvidia Tegra: Not just Windows, Android too