| Your response didn't make it clear to me where my recollection is wrong or in which ways I'm confused. The Apple II was doing very well at the time the IBM PC was introduced, but no one system dominated in any sense. It was clear early on, though, that IBM's entry into the market was going to be a milestone for the industry and that IBM was going to dominate in the business market, almost regardless of product quality because of the "IBM" name and marketing channels. Apple floundered with responses including the Apple III and the Lisa. Jobs clearly felt that IBM domination was nearly inevitable: look at the 1984 Mac commercial. I don't recall the "partners of IBM (which had a license to clone IBM PCs)": if there were any, they were very few and insignificant. Compaq was the first successful unauthorized PC clone and was promptly sued by IBM, who also became distracted for the rest of the decade trying to re-proprietarize PC architecture with the PS/2. IBM was seeing tremendous success with their PCs before clones became popular, though clones and the race toward low-priced commodity certainly helped the PC architecture become further dominant and ensured its continued dominance until the present day. I mostly agree with your statements about OS/2 vs. Windows 3.0/95/NT, and your point about Microsoft's partnerships leading to more Windows drivers is a good one. IBM wasn't in a good position to do this, since they were only interested in selling the whole box. This was certainly a factor in Windows' ascendancy and something that IBM didn't begin to catch onto until much too late. I don't foresee users becoming locked in to phones in anywhere near the same way as they did with PCs: even most users who have many apps on their phones and use them for some sophisticated tasks wouldn't have much of a problem jumping to a different mobile OS. This is due to several factors, including the types of tasks that people do with their phones (generally simpler tasks with less integration between multiple apps) and the ascendancy of both open/compatible document formats and web services. On the hardware side, people are already used to throwing out their cases/chargers/adapters when upgrading from last year's model to this year's model by the same manufacturer, so there's little lock-in there, though Apple at least has some capability for lock-in through so much of their (very popular) stuff being standardized around their proprietary Dock Connector. I'd say Apple's recent moves show that they get that mobile lock-in doesn't work in the same way and isn't as much of a factor as it is in the PC business: they're not trying to use their current market position to lock users in nearly as much as they're attempting to lock developers in. |