Adroid vs iOS - it's Microsoft vs Apple all over again

I was reading an interesting article on the PC World website called It's Android vs. Apple: Will You Switch Sides? It's all about who has the best phones, who will grab the market share, one person's experiences with an iPhone and trying to order the latest iPhone 4. It got me thinking about the mobile phone market and it is beginning to look like the old Microsoft vs Apple battle all over again, but this time Apple is taking on Google with its Android OS. It will loose this battle just as it lost against Microsoft and for the same reasons.

Microsoft designed Windows to run on any computer and there are hundreds, if not thousands of PC makers worldwide. There are therefore thousands of Windows PCs to choose from and new models appear every month, and probably every week or even every day from someone somewhere in the world. Apple has a small number of high priced computers that run OS X. It's not surprising that the market share is around 95 in Microsoft's favour (Apple's US share is higher than its global share though, but not much higher). Apple updates its computers infrequently.

The same situation is developing in the mobile phone world. Google has designed Android to run on any hardware and most, if not all mobile phone makers are developing Android phones. Lots of them are planned for this year, and LG alone is rumoured to have 20 in the pipeline. Not all Android phones are cheap, but some of them are, and every month or even every week there will be a new one from someone somewhere. They'll flood the market. Apple has just one high priced phone that it updates once a year (and only one carrier in the US too). How can Apple compete?

The mobile phone market isn't the PC market and there are other players too, such as BlackBerry and Microsoft's new mobile OS. However, because there will be so many competitors offering so many different models and prices, with new ones coming up with exciting new features, Apple will never grab the largest share of the market. It will do well and it deserves to because the iPhone is a great mobile, but it might just become a niche product like the Mac instead of a mass-market one. There are just too many alternatives.