Tech’s history is somewhat reminiscent of the city of Troy, which when it was discovered was found to have many layers with newer ones built on top of the old ones. In tech as new layers get built the old layers are abstracted away which results in those old layers becoming commoditized. Because once something is abstracted (hidden behind APIs) it doesn’t matter what brand it is, as long as it does its job. This has happened to components, such as disk drives. It has happened to entire computers in datacenters.
There are two major commoditization battles brewing now: mobile OS and mobile networks. On your mobile device as an enduser, you don’t really care about some of the major features exposed by a traditional desktop OS, such as the filesystem. You interact with data through applications that (ideally) transparently handle where that data resides (locally on phone versus in cloud). So what the battle between iOS and Android is really about is quality of the available apps and the experience those apps provide. The enduser does not care about the mobile OS per se.
The same is true for the mobile network. People don’t really care about which network they are on as long as call quality and data rates are good and pricing makes sense. There is no meaningful differentiation to the mobile experience from the network beyond those two (again: everything else is determined by the user experience of the apps). Carriers still keep trying to modify the experience to differentiate themselves, but I have yet to find a situation where the carrier’s attempt resulted in a net improvement in user experience.
If past commoditization battles are any indication, the companies that are facing the threat of commoditization will not go there quietly. Instead this is where lobbying, regulatory battles, patent suits will all play a major role in trying to delay the inevitable. Coming up in another post: what should carriers do instead of trying to muck with the user experience?
