iPhone vs. Android: The New Platform Wars?

Paul Murphy over at ZDnet has an interesting take on the Mac OS X Leopard reviews making the rounds on the web.  Murphy (rightly I think) points out some inconsistencies of the reviewers in failing to note certain aspects of Leopard but, more importantly, he says:

But if you ignore the partisan reviewers and ask what the real bottom line on “Leopard” is, the answer turns out to be the iPhone - because the current Mactels are this generation’s Apple IIIs.

What’s going on is that 10.5 is a mixed bag reflecting both short and long term agendas. In the short term it cleans up some x86 issues and offers some new user features raising the bar for Microsoft’s next effort -particularly with respect to time machine because this will be hard for Microsoft to duplicate while Apple’s adoption of ZFS means that all of the compexity here will disappear in the next release.

In the long term, however, what 10.5 is about is positioning Apple’s application developers to jump to the integrated server/playphone world of the future - that’s why there’s so much Solaris and Java development stuff there.

I think he's got it right. The important thing about Leopard is that it is the iPhone OS.  I believe that Apple has determined that the future of computing (or at least where there is money to be made) is in these smaller devices - iPods, iPhones and smaller laptop/tablet form factors.  The Mac OS X technology stack - Cocoa libraries (especially the "Core" libraries), H.264, Webkit - and the "noun" interface (which includes the Gesture input methods) is Apple's future.  To this stack, Apple has bolted on some complementary technology (for e.g. ZFS).

Add it all up and you have a very good OS stack for small devices like iPhones, iPods (and it is clear that the iPods future is the iPod touch and not the iPod classic), "Tablets" and event set top boxes.  The missing piece of this puzzle is the iPhone SDK.

Which brings us to Android, Google's new phone OS.  There has been some speculation that Apple will use Android as its SDK.  After all, Android uses the webkit rendering engine, which is the basis of Apple's Safari.  And, there does seem to be an "Apple" like influence to Android's UI.  But, I don't see it happening.

First off, Android uses Java, which Apple has shown some distain for.  Apple is seems to be firmly committed to Objective C.  But more importantly, the Android platform is meant to run on handsets from any manufactuer.  Anyone who knows anything about Apple and Steve Jobs knows that controlling the whole widget is important:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

So, what we have is Apple's more or less "closed" platform vs. Android's open one.  Not to mention the fact that Microsoft and Symbian will want to join this battle.

This is not unlike the Mac vs. Windows war of the late 1980's and early 1990's.  Who "wins" this war will depend on what Apple learned from its battles with Microsoft and, in no small part, to what degree the Android platform finds users.