The Android Oxymoron

The current competition in the smart phone space between Android and iPhone is both fascinating to watch and provides for some quite vigorous and entertaining debates. I find one pair of arguments particularly entertaining:

1. Apple is abusing their monopoly with iPhone
2. Android has more market share than iPhone and is selling at a faster rate

It’s interesting how often the same person will attempt to leverage both of these arguments (or likely better worded variants thereof) without ever realising that by definition, they can’t both be true. If Android is outselling iPhone, then it would be impossible for Apple to have a monopoly and thus can’t abuse it1{#footlink1:1305386215210.footnote}.

In fact, out of Apple and Google, the one company that does have a monopoly is actually Google – in search. This in itself isn’t an issue however. They acquired the monopoly through better innovation and execution and there’s no real argument to suggest that they are abusing that monopoly to artificially raise prices or extend into other markets2{#footlink2:1305386857294.footnote}.

What most people are trying to claim when they refer to Apple’s “monopoly” is that Apple has a monopoly on iPhones. However, that’s not a monopoly, that’s a product and a trademark. If you truly believe that a company which doesn’t OEM all it’s products is evil you will find yourself boycotting the vast majority of companies in all areas of life. That simply isn’t what a monopoly is and making such claims simply undermines your argument.

1 – this is different to not likely Apple because they’re not open source or not liking their policies, I’m specifically referring to the claim of monopolistic abuse↩

2 – on the other hand they seem to try to use GMail to extend into new markets a lot. Just not particularly successfully and I don’t think it would be reasonable to suggest that they have a monopoly even of free webmail provides let alone over email in general. ↩