Killer Apps

The only reason that HP (or Samsung, Motorola, Nokia/Microsoft, and the others) has a chance in this market is that those incompatible mobile OSes nevertheless all run the two greatest killer apps of them all, aka web browsers and GPS navigation. Most of the other apps (mail, social networks, etc.) that users need are web or cloud-based and can be accessed via the browser if an alternative is not provided. In this sense, there is only one OS and it is the one supported by HTML and other established web formats. Apple may be at a slight disadvantage because it does not support Adobe's Flash standard.

What those companies may need to do is identify a handful of the top killer apps in the existing market and spend the right amount of money to make sure that those apps migrate to their own platforms. Providing powerful tools that can facilitate app migration should probably be at the top of their to-do list. After that, the market will become very much like the car industry, a matter of status, gadgetry, trend and fashion. Eventually, there will only be one basic OS, preferably a user-customizable OS