Tim O’Reilly tweeted out what he called a “compelling” article today, the titular “Five Reasons iPhone vs. Android isn’t Mac vs Windows” by Mark Sigal. Having read the article I countered by tweeting that I thought the article was “biased” and “unbalanced”. Tim, in turn, was gracious enough to tweet back “@chrislynch_mwm U seemingly don’t like it when someone challenges your views. I found the piece compelling because I’d assumed the opposite”

Fair enough,  I thought, and admittedly it was maybe a little churlish to unfollow Tim just for passing on the article. I still don’t agree with Tim’s position though so, in the interests of open debate and to prove I really do enjoy a challenge, I thought I would post up something here to rebuke/challenge what I feel are the unbalanced points the article puts forth. Hopefully Tim will respond in due course.

Mark broke his view down into “five ‘little picture’ reasons Apple vs Google isn’t destined for the same outcome as Apple vs Microsoft“. My response follows the same format, but challenges Mark’s conclusions.

1. Retail Distribution: During the PC Wars, everything came down to distribution and presence on limited retail shelf space. To be successful, you had to be on the shelves of retailers like ComputerLand, CompUSA, Circuit City, Office Depot and MicroAge. Given the wide variety of hardware OEMs making Wintel-based PCs, both shelf-space for Macs and the technical know-how to sell them were severely limited, making a differentiation story like Apple’s a hard sell. Today, Apple Stores drive a superior environment for consumers to experience hardware hands-on and get educated about the full breadth of Apple products. An aside, this is a consumer touch point that Google absolutely lacks.

Many years ago, I worked in PC retail. From that perspective, shelf space was not the issue for the Apple Mac. Compatability was the issue. Consumers wanted a machine that would exchange files with their work place, a machine that could install the games that the kids heard their friends talking about school. Consumers wanted a choice of printers, scanners, joysticks, and other peripherals. Limited choice was an issue, but not because of shelf space.

Moving to the present day, Mark also seems to be overlooking the massive mobile retail sector. Here in the UK alone, every major network as stores in most towns and cities, there are multiple independent vendors who cover all the networks and operate nationally, and a large “grass roots” population of independent stores operate. I would argue that this gives Google ample retail touch points for its Google mobile devices. Moreover, these are the places that customers go to get their mobile devices. If you want to upgrade your mobile, you necessarily don’t go to one of Apple’s stores. In reality, I think it is statistically unlikely that you do, primarily because your phone is nothing without a network. Certainly in the UK, people don’t by handsets. They sign up for contracts, from networks.

On this front, I would call it a nil-nil draw between the iPhone and Android. If we are talking purely about representation and we exclude the negligable benefits of the Apple store in this arena, both Apple and Android are represented in the places that average consumers are going to go. Android could arguably win this point one-nil on the basis that they have more handsets than the iPhone, but I think a draw is the fairest result.

Pricing overhang: A primary reason for Apple’s crushing defeat by Microsoft was Apple’s misguided notion that it could charge grossly higher dollars for Mac products than Windows-based PC offerings. Contrast this with the present, where Apple is consistent in their assertion and awareness that it cannot and will not leave pricing overhang (i.e. a sufficient pricing gap between its products and the competition). This avoids the past dynamic where consumers saw picking Apple products as an either/or decision, in terms of price vs premier experience. iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad all have followed this course.

On this point, I can see where Mark is coming from. Historically, Apple have been an “expensive” choice. Expensive hardware, expensive peripherals, expensive spares, expensive servicing, etc. This is certainly something that Apple appear to be trying to address, although I would hardly call their products “cheap”. The current pricing for the iPad, for example, as compared to comparable tablet and netbook devices is very high indeed.

If you compare “pound for pound” on hardware, there were phones with better specification that cost less than the iPhone on the day it was released. As Mark points out though, hardware is not the deciding factor. I wonder, however, if this will be the case forever. Apple’s closed approach to their software mean that they are the only people investing in the platform for it. Want to create a “budget” iPhone, maybe without the GPS and with less storage, maybe a smaller screen? You can’t. Apple can, but you can’t. If you want to do this with Android though, the field is open.

So, at the moment I would score this as nil-nil also. Apple have certainly learnt their lesson, but I believe they well be taught it again if a budget mobile phone builder picks up Android as an alternative to writing their own software.

3. Developer ecosystem: It is a truism that in platform plays he who wins the hearts and minds of developers, wins the war. In the PC era, Apple forgot this, bungling badly by launching and abandoning technology initiatives, co-opting and competing with their developers and routinely missed promised milestones. By contrast, Microsoft provided clear delineation points for developers, integrated core technologies across all products, and made sure developer tools readily supported these core initiatives. No less, Microsoft excelled at ensuring that the ecosystem made money.

I’m with Mark on this one. It mirrors the logic by which I questioned the ascertion made in point #1. Perhaps Mark and I agree after all.

Lesson learned, Apple is moving on to the 4.0 stage of its mobile platform, has consistently hit promised milestones, has done yeomen’s work on evangelizing key technologies within the platform (and third-party developer creations – “There’s an app for that”), and developed multiple ways for developers to monetize their products. No less, they have offered 100 percent distribution to 85 million iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads, and one-click monetization via same.

Evangelism? Check. “There’s an app for that” has hit the zeitgeist and shows no signs of leaving. In this respect, more than any other, it is unquestionable that the iPhone has been a game changer. People now expect to be to upgrade their phone with new features through apps, they expect quick and easy installation, and they will pay for applications.

However, to claim 100% distribution is incorrect. Apple’s latest 4.0 version of the platform will not offer all facilities to all versions of the iPod Touch, iPhone etc. despite the fact that mobile phone vendors and Apple themselves are still selling these devices. The entry level iPhone, only recently hitting some UK networks, will not have all the features of 4.0. Therefore, if your software uses these features, the percentage of the market that you can access will be somewhat smaller than the 100% of 85 million devices that Mark claims. With mobile phone contracts running for eighteen months and upwards, this is a trend that almost certainly continue, especially as people pass on their first generation iPhones to other people as they upgrade. Today’s new gadget is tomorrow’s “hand me up”.

Whilst many, if not all, of these problems will also be faced by Android devices, the prevalence of Apple’s marketing and the rate at which they put new product into the market could exacerbate this. If Apple were really watching out for their development community, they would gear release cycles around the length of mobile contracts and provide better backward compatability.

Nested in every one of these devices is a giant vending machine that is bottomless and never closes. By contrast, Google has taught consumers to expect free, the Android Market is hobbled by poor discovery and clunky, inconsistent monetization workflows. Most damning, despite touted high-volume third-party applications, there are (seemingly) no breakout third-party developer successes, despite Android being around two-thirds as long as the iPhone platform.

I don’t agree that Google has taught consumers to expect “free”. Google Apps, Google Mail, Google Adwords, Google Checkout … all of these services cost money. The Internet, in general, encourages a culture of free. From my own experience of owning an iPod touch and knowing many other people who own them, pay for apps are not as popular as Mark might have us believe. It is impossible to ignore that the most popular apps are also the free ones.

In terms of Google’s Marketplace, I can agree with some of what Mark has to say. It is more difficult to find apps in this marketplace than it is in Apple’s, although this hardly makes Apple’s iTunes platform a paragon of virtue. It is better, but I don’t think anyone could make a strong argument for it being good. It is simply the only option when it comes to adding apps to your iPhone or iPod. Apple train the user to accept it as it is.

And that, for me, is where my opinion partts ways significantly with Mark’s. There is a fundmental and crucial difference between Apple’s app market and Android’s that Mark has ignored. One is open, the other … isn’t.

If you want to give away an app for the iPhone, you need the OK from Apple. If you want to sell an app for the iPhone, you need the OK from Apple. In a process shrouded in mystery, puportedly geared to protecting Apple’s interests, and seemingly arbitary to many, Apple control what software you can and can’t have.

On a piece of hardware you own, Apple dictate what you do.

If Microsoft did this, there would be uproar.

I appreciate that an impassionated argument about the difference between closed and open platforms is unlikely to sell any mobile phones. In my opinion, however, it doesn’t have to. The openness of the platform, the low cost of entry for non-Mac users, and the popularity of Google in the development community will enable to Android to catch up and overtake Apple’s app market. Simply put, if each platform has equal developers, Android apps will come out quicker.

Mark is right that there is no “killer app” for Android as yet. It has many of the killer apps of the Apple platform though, and there are more daily. If this marketplace can reach critical mass, it could emulate the mass appeal of Windows as a development platform and leave Apple floudering.

My score? One-nil to Android. The game is far from over, but I cannot see Apple undoing the fundamental mistakes that leave it at a disadvantage to Android in the long term.

Consumer technology adoption: During the PC era, large enterprises essentially dictated the industry winners by virtue of standardizing on a given vendor or type of solution. This created a winner-takes-all dynamic, inasmuch as consumers would ultimately buy the same solutions that had been blessed by large enterprises. By virtue of its conservative nature (remember the motto, “No ever got fired for buying IBM”?), staid Microsoft always felt like a safer choice than crazy Apple. And besides, accounting could solicit bids from multiple hardware vendors, which they liked.

By contrast, today’s breakthrough adoption begins in the consumer realm and filters back to enterprises, not the other way around. This change deeply favors a consumer products and marketing force like Apple. While Google has done a reasonable job in the consumer arena, its approach is decidedly design-lite and techie focused, not mass-market friendly.

And in case you haven’t noticed, Mark, accounting still like to solicity those multiple bids. In fact, it is fundamental part of the buying cycle. Apple don’t have the floor here. In fact, if we are looking a business purchasing then we really need to add Blackberry to the mix. iPhones are not the rugged workhorse type of phone favoured by many businesses. An Android phone in the right casing with the right mix of apps however? An Android phone that IT can write apps that plug into our internal systems? That’s a possibility.

Apple might be the desirable gadget here, but it is not the phone that the FD is going to stump up the cash for, and is not necessarily the phone that the CTO is going to get behind. Maybe Google do know who they are marketing to right now.

Of course, business is not the mass market so, to avoid falling into the same trap of mixing the two together … what about the mass market appeal of Android?

I think the answer is … consumers don’t care. They don’t care what operating system is running the phone any more than they care what processor is inside. What they care about are apps and, more importantly, services. Mobile phone marketing in the UK has focussed on the ability to access social networks such as Facebook and Twitter “on the move” heavily in the last year. Both HTC and Sony’s latest Android offerings bring these services together with SMS and eMail in a way that leaves the iPhone standing.

In conclusion on this point, I don’t think the business market will be as easily driven as Mark suggests, and I don’t think that consumers are walking around with their eyes closed. They may not know that it is Android, but they know Facebook and Twitter and they want them in their pocket. Again, the Android community has its eyes firmly on the prize here.

I’m tempted to claim this as a victory for Android, I think more realistically this is another draw. At least at half time.

5. Microsoft-like resilience: I remember too well the Microsoft mantra “Embrace-Extend-Extinguish,” which basically meant that any segment worth owning Microsoft would ultimately dominate by the 3.0 version of its competing product. Part of this was a by-product of the incredible “unfair advantages” Microsoft had built for itself by virtue of channeling items 1-4 above. Part of this was its ruthlessness in squeezing the lifeblood out of competitors through any means necessary. But, give Microsoft full props for manifesting an unyielding resilience to keep working its product offering and market assault until victory was at hand.

Considering Apple’s rise from the ashes to re-create a very profitable Mac business — the dominance it has created with iPod and iTunes; the powerhouse iPhone and iPhone platform and the ambitious, and already well-regarded iPad — does anyone wonder about Apple’s resilience? By contrast, Google remains almost completely dependent upon search and advertising, despite launching so many new product offerings and seriously pursuing M&A over the past several years. Arguably, Google’s famously loosely coupled structure leads to a lot of seeds being planted, but so too, it seems to a less than laser-like focus on seeing those seeds to cultivation and full harvest. It begs the question, “Can a tiger change its stripes?”

Apple certainly is a resilient beast, arguably the greatest phoenix in the industry right now.

Mark is also correct that the vast majority of Google’s income comes from search and advertising. So, yes, they are “reliant” on this. What is not being pointed out here, however, is that this single source of income that Google are so reliant on has netted them a warchest of some 22 billion dollars in cash as of October of last year. They have the cash to make the long miles on this one, just like Apple. (In the interest of parity, Apple have a reported warchest of $40 billion in cash and securities).

So, Google have yet to face tough times like Apple. Arguably, this is because they have yet to crash and burn as Apple so nearly did. Perhaps they will yet, perhaps they never will. Either way, coming back from losing one war does not make you better prepared to fight the next one.

At best, another nil-nil draw.

So, in conclusion, that’s my take on things. I have tried to balance and temper my view, even though I set out to argue against what I viewed as a pretty skewed piece of reporting by delivering one of my own. Hopefully, seen side by side, there is a logical argument that can be constructed from the two opposing viewpoints.

I believe Android is behind, for the moment, but will catch up and overtake Apple’s platform. I think the openness of the platform and the accessibility of it to hardware vendors will counter Apple’s marketing and current market share strangle hold. Mobile hardware now has cameras, GPS, fast processors, plenty of storage. Making a better iPhone is about having better apps, and it is irrefutable that open platforms experience faster and more prolific development than closed platforms.

At least, in my opinion. Perhaps I’ll be fortunate enough to get Tim’s feedback on this.