How many OSes Can Cell Phone Users Stand?

You are used to the computing landscape. You've got OS X, Windows and Linux, and are a few more OSes out there for the technologically driven.

With cell phones, the landscape is different. Depending on which phone you buy you could end up with OS X, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry OS, Android, WebOS (if you are one of the four people who own a Pre) and so forth.

It is at this point that a perceptive computer user remembers the olden days and thinks "One OS must be dominant." The savvy user who has that thought thinks it for a reason. Way back in the eighties there were a jillion different computer systems. Every company was out to sell computers, the hardware, and not the software. Take Apple for example, at one time the company was pushing the Apple//, the Mac and the Lisa. Each of those machines used a different OS and the Apple // had more than one OS.

In those days, the thought was that the profit was all in the hardware, the software just came along for the ride. That mindset is largely responsible for the success of Microsoft. Phone types still embody this mindset, the cell phone is the prize, not the software that just allows you to use the nifty hardware (or network).

So when a grizzled computer veteran looks at the landscape he or she laughs a little. Apple is just setting itself up for another fall by not licensing the iPhone OS. Sooner or later something more open will come along and kill the iPhone proving, once and for all, that Apple values profits more than dominance. 

The entire notion that the path of smart phones will follow the path of computers is a mistaken, though easy, conclusion to reach. People will argue that smart phones are just smallish computers. This is a notion that is hard to argue with, when it comes down to it, you've got a processor and a screen that runs off software. Heck, the first iPhone made the first Mac look like an abacus in comparison. Long-time industry watchers say: computers did this, cell phones are computers, therefore one OS will be dominant.

But cell phones aren't like computers back in the 90s. Cell phones are cheap, where people kept a computer for five or more years in the early nineties people keep a cell phone for two years (or less). Where a computer required a huge initial investment in software and hardware, a cell phone is sign here get three free.

So there really isn't anything, with the exception of the App store, pushing users to stay on the same platform. And even the App Store isn't the force that software was in the nineties, you don't have a thousand dollar copy of Photoshop sitting on your iPhone forcing you to buy the next version of the iPhone when your current phone becomes unusable.

Remember also that everyone has a cell phone. Estimates range up to 4.6 billion cell phones in use worldwide. PCs, on the other hand, are estimated to number around a billion and the experts say that two billion won't be hit until 2015. So instead of seeing an industry in its infancy and expecting the cell phone world to catch up to  the computer landscape, the experts are looking at an industry that has already surpassed the PC world in both maturity and penetration.

So, just how many OSes can the cell world stand? As many as companies can profitably create and that number is a lot more than three.