Blessing or Curse? The emergence of dominant designs

Another entry in the competitive Tablet and mobile device operating system market will quickly fade away:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/hp-punts-on-webos-discontinues-touchpad-cuts-outlook/55386

The once promising Palm (remember that this was probably the first successful Personal Data Assistant, PDA) introduced by US Robotics in 1997.  Not quite a touch screen device, it used a gesture-based stylus input called graffiti to enter text.  Clearly, a forerunner of today’s finger-based control and input for smart phones and tablets alike (no I did not forget the Apple Newton).

Sold to 3Com and then spun-off and then purchased by HP, the linage from those humble early days of PDAs to the WiFi, 3G, 4G, platform of today is essentially unbroken.  However, as many other early leaders in the field, this Operating System (OS) line may have just stopped with the announcement from HP.

Once a viable competitor to the RIM Blackberry environment (Palm introduced a PDA Smartphone, as best I can tell around 2002), Palm OS lost traction to RIM OS and Symbian, and then to Apple iOS and Google Android.  Valiant efforts in pushing cool devices such as the Palm pixi, etc. never had any market impact.

Without significant traction in the competitive consumer marketplace (or in the business market), there is a whole list of environments that have essentially come to a screaming halt once a new set of   dominant designs emerge (an interesting question is how many can a market support?).

Examples include:

• GONE: DEC – VAX VMS was the engineering environment development of choice.  Killed with Unix and Windows products. (VMS is still supported, but has no significant impact on the marketplace)
• GONE: Atari, Amiga, and a host of other personal computers.  Killed by Apple (although after some significant stumbles) and most assuredly by the IBM PC.
• GONE: CP/M, GEM, and a host of other operating systems.  Killed by the Windows juggernaut.
• GONE: Symbian.  Once the darling of the mobile device world, Nokia has stopped development.
• GONE: WebOS.  Well, maybe not gone (that was not what the announcement said) but HP is killing the mobile devices that use HP WebOS.
• GOING?: Blackberry OS.  RIM has to continue the development and support for a platform (really multiple platforms) that runs only on RIM devices.  With a significant shift to iOS and Android, how long will this last?
• GOING?: Windows Mobile.  Although there are several committed manufacturers (Nokia being one of them) market share is scant, so the future is a bit uncertain.
• MAKE IT AS A NEW DOMINANT DESIGN?: Windows 8.  A clear push by Microsoft to change the paradigm of the desktop (and I assume tablet as well) to a presumption of connection to the Internet for collaboration, interaction, and services.

There is no easy answer to how a dominant design emerges.  In some cases, an open platform that can be used my multiple hardware providers works well.  This is the Android and Windows model.  In other cases, it still looks like a closed, proprietary environment like Apple iOS.

However, there are some clear items we can identify:

• You have to have an excellent customer experience.  This is an Apple trademark.
•  The device has to have a full range of value.  In general, customers do not care about the platform, they care about it doing what they want reliably in a way that feels good (that look and feel thing).  iTunes brought huge value, to customers (I can get the music I want right now), to developers (I can sell something to a customer right now), and businesses (I can differentiate my business to a customer right now).
• You can not let the platform go stale.  This has two parts.  First, make them feed on the next cool device (again, Apple).  Second, the guts of the system need to keep up.  Windows plays catch-up with Apple OS, and RIM let their OS lag and now has a fragmented environment driving customers and developers to go nuts.
• Feed the ecosystem.  Apple is the best at this.  This includes software developers (see the above issue with RIM) and the companies that make add-ons to the iPhone and iPad.

Soon up, a look at dominant design in other emerging services, such as Cloud processing, storage, and applications as well as a look at the growing three-way (and maybe four way) battle in the IT landscape (Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon).