In light of recent developments in the mobile world, it’s interesting to think about what kind of “choice” is valuable.
On the one side, you have Android, which is “open” as it gets, but clearly to its own detriment. Rando carriers customize everything from your dialing app to your home screen, and so consumers get to navigate a sparse matrix of hardware designs and crappy software UIs. Zero consistency. The value of choice here seems pretty small.
On the other side, you have the iPhone. You have a choice of apps, but very little choice in hardware. What you do get instead, is a nice consistent experience, and a shit-ton of apps built around that consistent experience. There’s very little value in terms of choice when it comes to the hardware, and even the OS, but lots when it comes to the apps.
Windows Phone 7 might be somewhere in the middle. Pretty good hardware variety, but MS also restricted the various mods that could be done to the phones, thereby maintaining somewhat of a consistent experience across them.
It seems clear that some kind of consistent experience is valuable. When there is no consistency, the choice no longer is one that is between two slightly varying products, but one between two very different products.
If you look at the PC, Microsoft has really shown the way. The Windows experience is mostly the same across all the products that run Windows. And when it is not, it’s usually because of crappy OEM-installed crap, which is universally hated. There is enough consistency here that Windows users for the most part know what to expect from every PC, yet the choice available, both in terms of hardware and software is huge. If MS can bring the same combination of consistent high quality experience with choice in the areas that matter (hardware, applications), it can certainly win the phone market too. It’s what the people want.
Apple got there first, and appealed to a lot of the people by offering consistency and quality over choice at first, but as the entire concept of a smart phone is further commoditized, it’s hard to see the “one true way” approach taking over the market.