[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.