[chubot]

Computer industries and platforms naturally tend toward monopolies. You need the virtuous the developer <-> user loop for a platform to survive.

Apple said that without its App Store and developers people may stop buying iPhones.

So "winning on the phone" means "getting the monopoly". The situation where both platforms have 50% of the market isn't really stable in the computer industry.

[Steko]

"Computer industries and platforms naturally tend toward monopolies."

The last 20 years of console platform wars have proven this to be very false in a market not driven by corporate purchasing.

[chubot]

I wouldn't say the difference is corporate purchasing. One important reason why consoles are special cases is that there's no data that needs to be migrated from one machine to another. You just buy new games for the new console and you don't care about the data on the old console.

There's also no data that you share between 2 machines or 2 users.

Migrating from Windows to Mac used to be a huge pain because you had to move your data. And also it was beneficial to buy Windows if people were e-mailing you Word docs and spreadsheets so forth.

And then you need the entire support ecosystem and the employee base who understands Windows, which wasn't relevant to consoles.

Small businesses and individuals are just as swayed by this as corporations.

Phones have some of these issues but not all. If you could buy an Android phone, and then instantly sync all your Apple account data to it, like the music you bought, your contacts, and the photos you took, etc. then it would be a different story. But that's never going to happen.

Even FaceTime is an example of introducing a network effect. It's more valuable to buy an iPhone if your son or daughter has an iPhone so you can FaceTime with them.

[Steko]

So wait the first argument was that user-developer loop always leads to monopoly in computing. That's blown up and now OS lock in is what leads to monopoly? But iOS has far more lock in than Android right? So how does that lead to Android monopoly?

"I wouldn't say the difference is corporate purchasing...

And also it was beneficial to buy Windows if people were e-mailing you Word docs and spreadsheets so forth."

I'm not sure how you're trying to leverage the compatibility argument against the idea of the market being driven by corporate purchases when it's actually a consequence of it.

[chubot]

The original claim was that computer platforms tends toward monopolies. The existence of consoles is an interesting data point but it isn't a counterargument to this.

The user-developer loop (1) is part of the reason, and API / data lock-in (2) is another part of it.

Just like in the first case, causation in the second case goes both ways. Corporations (and not just corporations) buy Word because there is Word data and there are Word users out there.

"Corporate purchasing" doesn't explain very much to me and isn't the salient difference between consoles and phone OSes or desktop OSes. Corporations bought Windows because of the more fundamental factors that I'm pointing out.

[dataangel]

You are correct, but mostly because console lock in simple doesn't matter as much. New console doesn't play your old games? Your old games probably suck more than the new ones anyway. New office suite can't open your customer spreadsheet? You're fucked.

[hackinthebochs]

Also consider that consoles have been largely unprofitable for Microsoft until recently. The console wars were a proxy for the set-top future that these companies were predicting. If consoles had to be profitable in their own right, Sony would have won a long time ago. Nintendo has been a niche for a few generations now so they don't really count (though I'm not sure how you'd classify the Wii here).

[lmm]

Sony eats enormous upfront losses to establish its consoles. The PS2 is now the best-selling console of all time, but even with their PSX profits they would've struggled to attract the investment needed to develop it and spend the first few years selling at a loss without the Sony mothership bankrolling them.

Nintendo by contrast makes a profit on every console it sells from day 1. IIRC the Wii is the most popular of the current generation, so I don't think you can dismiss them like that.

I suspect that in a world where console businesses had to stand or fall on their own we'd've seen a less ambitious PS2, with a higher initial price, which would ultimately have attracted fewer developers and been a more modest success. And the PS3 would look a lot more like the Wii in terms of specs and price. How much this would've damaged bluray adoption and HDTV sales is an interesting channel for speculation (and is one of the big reasons sony is happy to subsidize its console division a bit).

[dagw]

Nintendo by contrast makes a profit on every console it sells from day 1. IIRC the Wii is the most popular of the current generation, so I don't think you can dismiss them like that.

Not only that, they've made 4 of the top 10 selling console games this year. By contrast Microsoft Studios has 1 game on the top 10 list and the best selling game by Sony is on 26th place. The numbers are basically the same for 2011. So not only are they make healthy profits by selling more consoles than anybody else, they're also running an incredibly successful (and I assume profitable) games studio selling games for those consoles. That's not too shabby for a niche player.

[lmm]

The fact that Nintendo profits from games actually goes along with the great grandparent's point though. IIRC a large part of the death of Sega was a "sell consoles cheap, subsidising them with the profits we make on games" model.

[lmm]

I think it's less about corporate vs. non-corporate and more that games are very different from most categories of software. See also the relative success of open source.