Why Google Did Android
Not entirely convinced that Apple would own the mobile space without Android. There were lot of mobile handset incumbents when IPhone came out. It was the one-two punch of IPhone AND Android that destroyed the handset dominance of the likes of Nokia and Blackberry.Had there not been an Android, I'm pretty sure one of those incumbents would have come up with something.Nokia, for example, had lots of nice Linux handheld devices before IPhone. They were encumbered by a degraded engineering culture and Symbian.People don't remember but, what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water. Until then they had had a fairly good portion of the market, but that single statement just killed it. People who did not like IPhone moved from Nokia phones to Android after that.Now, without Android, there might have not been such an obvious migration path, and Nokia might have kept some of it's customers. Nokia managed to get some great handsets out after that, but they had already lost market momentum.Nokia was never a big competitor in the US market mainly because they refused to play the game by the operators rules, hence the operators did not really endorse them.Without Android, once again, I think there might have been openings for Nokia to get into the handset market state side.Or Blackberry or Ericsson might have come up with something.The thing that commoditized handset market was not actually Android, but the availability of cheap radio circuits from Asia. Until then the radio technology had been the secret sauce of the encumbents, not software. When the radio stack became commoditized, the playing field changed fairly rapidly.I'm pretty sure there would have been competing Linux enabled smart devices in one way or another without Android. Android just got there first.