OS Wars vs Patent Wars

The Patent Wars

The holidays are now over, so time to resume the activity after the holiday break. However, August has not been as quiet as it normally is, at least in the Mobile Industry, well, it was, until Google announced by mid month that they where acquiring Motorola’s mobility to seriously jump into the hardware industry and give yet more power to the Android platform they have been developing over the last few years. Although boosting Android (see stats below) is the main official reason behind the operation, Motorola’s vast portfolio of patents has surely played a role in the decision, specially after the war started earlier this year when Apple and a number of other manufacturers, including Microsoft and RIM teamed to acquire other patent portfolios, something which was publicly criticized by Google.

This comes in a moment where Android is clearly becoming the rival to fear for Apple’s omnipresent iOS powering their iPhones and iPads. While SmartPhone sales rocket literally on every market, Android surpassed iPhone in market penetration on a global basis, after it had already done so in the US in November 2010. If we include tablets into the equation, Apple still leads the way.

But not everything seems to be a honeymoon after Google’s announcement. Even though Google claims to have gained agreement with the main phone makers using Android, looks like behind the lines some of them are not too happy about Google entering into competition with them in their traditional marketplace. Maybe casually, only two weeks later Samsung announced a new set of devices using the Bada Operating System, the Waves Y, M and 3.

Probably this will not mean that Bada will gain enough market penetration to threaten Android’s leading market position, but from an application development and marketing perspective, definitely is something to keep an eye on, as this could potentially degrade into an OS war.

When facing the marketing, product definition and development of a mobile application, one of the key decisions to take is the platforms to support. Every business will have different target audiences, and the multiplicity of platforms has a great impact on the total cost of ownership of the mobile software products companies provide. It is not only the different skills needed for development, but also the different user experiences that each platform provides, as well as the increasing complexity of testing, customer support, incident management, etc. This is clearly being a barrier for some other platforms to gain growth in the number of available applications in their respective application stores and markets, as corporations will need a minimum number of customers to justify the development and maintenance costs for a specific platform.

Time will tell wether this evolves into an OS war, or wether the market continues the consolidation under the two -for the moment- winners.