[Windows RT General] e.mote:
>[walled gardens] can also be widely successful commercially. Despite the far larger number of Android devices, iOS devices bring in more money for the company that makes them

iOS is making more money for Apple not because it's a walled garden, but despite it. iOS is successful because of Apple's other qualities--innovation, simplicity, polish, etc which comprise the nebulous "user experience." One may argue that the curated Apple Store lends to that experience, but again, curated apps don't a walled garden make. Goog Play is curated.

The reason walled gardens fail is because of the network effect--getting users themselves to drive adoption. The rise of the "social networking" craze is predicated upon this. Facebook became a multi-billion dollar company, as with numerous other co's. But even before this, the network effect manifested in the fall of AOL (a walled garden) vs the Internet. It's basic math: a million users (or even a small fraction thereof) are more creative than a handful few.

Secondly, to say that "iOS makes more money than Android" means little. What you're talking about is a snapshot in time, ie "right now," whereas the correct way is to look at the trend lines. Apple stock is taking a beating because its margins are under pressure by Android, and market share for iPad likewise are eroding under the constant stream of ever-more numerous Android tabs. Everybody and his kid sister is putting out an Android tablet, which will lead to faster price erosion. Everyone will take a hit, but Apple will take it harder than most, since fat margins is what Apple is predicated on, whereas other vendors are more used to slim profits. There are several trends to this commoditizing effect.

The lynchpin in this Apple downtrend is that, unlike in previous years, Jelly Bean is now on par with iOS 6.x in user experience, ie "good enough." Android apps have not reached iOS' level, but as demand rises, so will supply (devs). For Apple to improve, it will need to keep on innovating, not resort to raising the walls of its garden higher (as MS is doing).

MS isn't wrong to copy Apple. It's wrong in copying all of Apple's worst attributes--premium pricing, walled garden, the go-it-alone mentality.

>I think the Win8 model is a decent compromise

What you or I think--or anyone else--doesn't matter. What matters is what users collectively think, by dint of where they spend their dollars. We already know how Win8 is faring sales-wise.

Another way to view this is from the company's stock price--again, seeing how people vote with their dollars rather than the online yapping. I don't have to remind how MSFT is performing YTY.

We'll see how doubling-down with Blue pans out. On the face of it, it's a reasonable move, if you blame Win8's poor perf on peripheral factors, eg v1.0 issues, limited hardware availability, high prices, etc. Put another way, you'd want to double-down if you think Win8's central premise is sound: force-feeding Metro to users to get them to adopt it, and let the desktop wither away. Suffice it to say that I differ. As with Win8, we can compare notes again by year-end.

>bear in mind that Android has far more malware than any other smartphone OS right now

Irrelevant. Windows has had the largest volume of malware by dint of size alone, and nowhere has there been evidence that malware affected its market share. Similarly, the "less malware" arg didn't boost the Mac OS share any. If people care that much about security, we'd all be using some hardened version of BSD by now.

That walled gardens make users safer may be a desirable side-effect, but there is no mistaking that the main reason is to maintain control by creating lock-ins, thereby to maximize profits. This is rather critical for MS especially, as its cash cows are winding down, hastened by its very own actions.

Speaking of side-effect, one effect that will result from charging for updates is that some won't update. This in turn means that there'll be numerous OS variations, creating a nightmare for support along with a greatly fragmented userbase. MS can't follow Apple here, since the Windows eco is much more varied than Apple's. As mentioned earlier, my logical take on this is that MS will need to go subscription for Win, aka Win365, whereby updates are automatic. MS can make this effectively mandatory by severely gimping non-sub options, as happened with Office 2013 vs Office 365.