The Mobile Wars are in full effect, do we really want the iPhone to “Win?”

Funny little question isn’t it? Coming from someone who loves Apple products and thinks the iPhone is one Gee Golly Whiz Bang product, why would I say I sincerely hope that the iPhone doesn’t take a dominant market share and force other players out of the market? It’s simple. Have you ever heard of the power company? Cable TV? Any monopolistic service company?

“One phone to rule them all, and copy and paste to no one!”

Say what you want about the Windows monopoly trial days, Windows has always been an extremely extensible platform open to 3rd parties to develop a myriad of cool solutions for. Awesome 3rd party hardware and software has been around for Windows as long as it has.

If you look at the same environment around the iPhone it’s a little scary. Sure, you can be you’re own iPhone developer, but you better not write anything that competes with an Apple product or goes against AT&T’s interests. That will win you a one way ticket to the outs with the Apple Application Store. You will get tossed, no reason, no explanation, you are out.

I can’t imagine the entire mobile world innovating at the Apple speed limit. What is that you say? What Apple speed limit? Well, take a look at all of Apple’s product lines. Want Blu-Ray in your Mac? Better spend $2800 for a Mac Pro, then another $500 for a 3rd party drive because they don’t offer it yet. What eSATA on your iMac, it just simply isn’t possible.

Apple makes some fantastic products, but it ships to Jobs and Ive’s specs and they make damned sure you can’t do anything to change that.

The Mobile market is the wild wild west at the moment with Symbian, Windows Mobile, Apple, Android and RIM all fighting to create compelling products with compelling features. Currently I use a Windows Mobile phone, and would consider an iPhone, but you can’t tether an iPhone to your laptop. Why do you ask? Because AT&T doesn’t want to suffer the bandwidth hit of laptops using their network.

These are all simple things that are readily available with today’s technology, but Apple has an uncanny knack for decided what we need and don’t need (firewire anyone?) and making their products quite closed to meet those ends.

I love the iPhone and I love what it can do, but having it as the only option would be quite a scary proposition.

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