larwe wrote:
On Dec 27, 3:29 pm, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:If smartphones ever converge on one (or at most two) architectures, then they may supplant the Wintel platform as the most numerous, hosting the greatest number of apps.If we're using this sort of metric then Symbian has already won - at the end of 2008, 40 million Symbian OS phones had been shipped into Japan _ALONE_. But that's not the metric being discussed - we are talking about total number of computers of a specific make and model, not speculating about the number of members of a "platform" shipped. Many of the PC-compatible machines shipped since 1981, which you lump into the same category for more convenience in hyperbole, weren't even compatible with _each other_ let alone an arbitrary third-party standard. By and large, every C64 shipped will run every piece of C64 software shipped [for the same target TV system anyway].
If Symbian were a platform open to application developers, then I'd accept the comparison--but it isn't. The applications are very tightly controlled, and do not constitute an open market in any sense--which is why there is no flood of Symbian apps. The volume significance of any product is proportional to the downstream market that it leverages. In the beginning, even many "PC clone" manufacturers did not understand the necessity of complete architectural compatibility, and those "clones" were relatively low volume and short lived. The later wave of true clones, pioneered by Compaq, ushered in the age of the "IBM PC", which flourishes long after IBM exited the field. Modern PCs will boot old DOS apps when provided with compatible peripherals! Low-priced, even home-built, machines with excellent performance and reliability, ready to run OS and software, created the vibrant market we all enjoy today (even if we don't use PCs!), and it is very much in the spirit of the Apple II open system and its unauthorized clones. -michael NadaNet and AppleCrate II: parallel computing for Apple II computers! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."