I don't think that Apple is going to shoulder the entire burden of the future.
What I do think is going to happen is that sometime in the next ten years, "the competition" will finally realize that Apple has been right all along, and that a successful design-minded tech company isn't a fluke. Gruber put it best in his "
Apple needs a Nikon" piece:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Gruber
I get the sense that many of these companies see Apple’s success this decade as an aberration — that the Apple bubble will soon pop and mediocre jumbles will return to the top of the technology heap. But what if it’s the other way around, and the aberration was Apple’s tepid success in the 1990s? It’s not just us — technology-design obsessed consumers — who would benefit from at least one company stepping up and competing against Apple on Apple’s own ground. Apple would too, in that competition would push them to do even better, and act as a preventative against hubris.
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That first line sums it up perfectly. Packing features into a spec sheet is not going to cut it now that Apple is back on track. Before the future can happen, Apple really does need a Nikon, because to put it bluntly, I'm starting to get weary of the current tech landscape, where we have Apple doing it right and everyone else doing it wrong.
Apple's Nikon isn't going to be a hardware OEM. HTC/Moto/Samsung will never be able to give the iOS ecosystem a real run for its money as long as they are chained to Android. It's going to be an integrated vendor. I don't think it will be RIM because RIM is, well, utterly screwed, and the only way it's going to be HP is if HP absorbs as much of Palm's corporate DNA as they can. And even then, it's a crapshoot.
In general, the idea that one company can do the hardware while another does the OS needs to die. It's a user-hostile strategy and until someone else fully commits to an integrated strategy, Apple is going to continue to thwomp everyone in the tablet market. But it might be a while, and until then, it's all Apple, all the way. HP seems to have the right idea, but execution is everything, and we're still waiting for the first post-Palm webOS device. Microsoft really did pull the wool over everyones eyes on this front, and it will be a while until the blinders are all the way off. When everyone realizes that Apple's success
isn't an aberration, and that "mediocre jumbles" are not going to return to the top of the heap like the Wintel machines of the 90's, then we will have real competition on our hands, and then we can move into "The Future."
Until Apple's Nikon comes along, Apple will continue to define computing. The iPad has a real good shot at Windows-like dominance. Maybe it will take that kind of dominance for everyone to realize that Apple is doing something right, and that the iPad bubble isn't going to pop like the Apple II bubble did.
Apple is changing the game, but everyone else is still playing by the old rules. Someone is going to have to throw the Wintel rulebook out the window if they want to take Apple head on, and I don't see this happening until Apple is so dominant they effectively are the face of computing. Until then, it's all too easy for the competition to write off the appeal of Apple products as "branding" and stay the course. Like I said, HP appears to be beginning to see the light, but they've yet to prove they can execute.
It has to happen eventually, because no one company can dominate forever, but it won't be any of the yahoos we have now in their current state.