Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog

How the iPhone "Disrupted" Microsoft's Windows Mobile

Great story in Wired about how Apple disrupted Microsoft's mobile OS lead, again illustrating how quickly today's leaders can, and probably will, become tomorrow's laggards in the topsy-turvy tech biz.

And on the benefits of Apple's heretical "closedness":

The iPhone operates on a closed system, which can only run on Apple hardware, meaning third- party developers can produce apps and games that work exclusively with the iPhone Therefore, despite Apple’s questionable and controversial approval policy for iPhone apps developers can code one app that works with 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices which is less time consuming than developing several versions of one app for a variety of Windows Mobile smartphones. In turn, that spells out to a larger number of  apps in the App Store, which enables Apple’s hardware to cater to a larger and broader audience.

posted by Berin Szoka @ 10:20 PM | Antitrust & Competition Policy