You&#x27;re just redefining &quot;technical and system properties&quot; to be things you find important, rather than things the majority of consumers find important.<p>&gt; Which mobile OS prevails is of little relevance to most consumers, who seek means to ends and the nature of software is that the precise workings of these means are often obscure to them or otherwise not important provided ends (telephony, messaging, browsing, productivity apps, entertainment, or communication and consumption in general, etc.) are met.<p>But iOS and Android won by providing superior messaging&#x2F;browsing&#x2F;productivity&#x2F;entertainment, that&#x27;s the entire point. Nobody is arguing that the kernel in iOS or Android is superior to QNX or Symbian (I have no idea myself, having never looked at the system level of any of those platforms), but rather that iOS and Android provided superior experiences, and that&#x27;s why they won.<p>And in a lot of ways, it&#x27;s the SV culture and its focus on consumer preferences (often mocked as childish and unserious -- &quot;yet another cat photo sharing app&quot;) that made it possible for those two platforms to destroy the competition. It turns out consumers really do care if Instagram or Angry Birds is possible or available.<p>&gt; For there were other platforms besides Android and iOS, and those would have evolved just the same and we would be speaking of some other location exerting cultural dominance.<p>I have no idea where you get so much confidence that alternative OS platforms would have evolved &quot;just the same&quot; -- mobile platforms were a stagnant morass before iOS and (very shortly after) Android came around.<p>&gt; As such, you cannot argue that SV culture has dominated just by the fact of some product being influential alone, since it&#x27;s a circular argument that ignores most such technologies are not pursued for the actual technological properties.<p>&quot;Actual technological properties&quot; here meaning apparently whatever you think is important, and not what actual consumers think is important. User experience is technology. Apple and Google are better at it than Nokia or RIM.