For our readers that study Game Theory the title of this post is all that has to be said. Speaking only from this discipline, Apple has already lost in any theater of war it opens in the service of maintaining an iPhone-only world. While it is not impossible to arrive at a future without Android, it is more possible to arrive at a future with market equilibrium. This is both true and paradoxical. This is because an analyst has to model competitive advantage with the value of material efficiency greater than market force to see this, but from a perspective that expects the entire market to be optimized and not simply one carrier and device, you can clearly see that not only is it atypical for a single device to contain 100% market share, the loss for such an imbalance belongs to the consumers and it is a win that Apple got this far.

Apple contends that for them to win the others have to loose. This is a textbook Zero Sum Game. Google, HTC, and the open handset alliance are competing in a Constant Sum game where each is incentivized to cooperate in a practice where each player's victory incrementally benefits all players by expanding the field of play, and no player has incentive to risk critical loss. Though Apple is not "playing their game" they are upon their field entirely without the advantage of a market position within. Apple doesn't sell phones beyond AT&T, nor do they sell phones that are carrier independent such as Google's Nexus. Apple definitely doesn't sell on Sprint and they don't allow developer culture outside their own interface dogma which is expressed in it's AppStore approval process. Apple simply doesn't operate in HTC's market. Apple operates it's own market and only in the service of AT&T- a carrier that had a track record of selling touch-screen HTC devices (under the name iPaq) for 5 years before the iPhone arrived in 2007.

Apple has filed suit against HTC, a robust and fortified, mature company in good standing with many organizations which give it the protection of thousands of patents. It is far more likely that the patents contained within these organizations are infringed upon by the iPhone. While Apple has what they believe to be a zero sum advantage, in 10 patents they believe they can assert against AT&T. They have a constant sum defeat that has already come to pass. As the survival of HTC benefits every manufacturer. The patent cross license agreements, covering the alliances, organizations and groups et al. which Apple is not a part of, now have all of their patents extending over HTC. The arena Apple just opened, with a predictable and clumsy move is one where their 10 patents will be examined against the backdrop of an entire industry united in the support of "open". Which mathematicians will likely refer to in the future, as the mother of all bear traps, which bound a 900 pound Gorilla on it's own dime. If you run the numbers you can see Apple will eventually compete as an equal and submit it's victories in a way that helps industry.

This article covers the unique meaning of "open" that generated the Android phenomenon, some quirks about intellectual property, and a little film noir. We set the stage with math, but we need
to go to Casablanca to understand Android.

Casablanca

Global economic conditions have depressed sales in every column of
consumer electronics. Every column except smartphones which,
curiously, are booming in a recession. Inside this boom there are
moving parts at work that confound intellectual property analysts and
set the stage for what is emerging as one of the most fantastical yet
factual stories that have ever come out of Silicon Valey. The story of
two platforms, Android, and the iPhone and one of these platforms has
a curiously lucky feeling.

Many in the industry are surprised when they learn that Android is not
Anti-Apple and does not belong to Google. It is a virtual machine
similar to SUN's JVM called Dalvik that runs on Linux and has a layer
of libraries that developers can use to make apps via a software
development kit or SDK. It's not much different than Ubuntu Linux.

What is different is the strategic positioning of Dalvik and a
something known by intellectual property professionals as multiple
infringer conditions. Conditions under which a patent is violated by a
product user and not an individual manufacturer. There must be a
single infringer to enforce a patent upon. When the single infringer
is part of the Open Handset Alliance, there is another interesting
feature. The Open Handset Alliance has a built in patent cross
license. This means that they claim the benefit of the patents of all
Open Handset Alliance members. Which at this point is every mobile
manufacturer except Apple. Android is Open Source Software released
under the Apache Software License Version 2 which allows unhindered
commercial use and it's Linux underpinnings were lucky enough to have
multi touch functionality added by way of the Linux Kernel months ago.
Take all of those entities into consideration, and you have quite a
problem determining who is responsible for a feature on an Android
Device.

Googles nurturing of the open source project and the community of
developers within, along with consumer confidence in Google's brand
and the battle tested promise of open source and the linux kernel have
created a honeypot for device manufacturers and app developers looking
for freedom to operate in an industry stifled by intellectual property
claims.

As the only booming sector of consumer electronics, the mobile
industry is a battlefield and Android has become mobile's Casablanca.

To developers around the world, the indicators of a viable platform
are largely accessibility and reach. The common app developer has the
wherewithal to work in 2 perhaps 3 platforms. The iPhone App Store and
the multiple Android markets are the only platforms where developers
anywhere in the world can make products and sell direct to the
American consumer at scale. Android and iPhone developers are in
comparable demand but with tablets, media players, phones and
net-books already flooding the market, development trends clearly
favor Android.

The promise of "open" attracted much of the out-of-work laid-off
technical talent pool. With free training and education available if
you have a computer and an internet connection, the Android open
source project has minted capable mobile developers out of run of the
mill web developers and Computer Science PhD's alike. Comparing the
hundreds of iPhone app developers at Silicon Valley's 3rd annual
iPhoneDevCamp to the hundreds of monthly attendees of the Silicon
Valley Android Developers Meetup, you see a lot of crossover. In
Silicon Valley the developer is king and there was no boundary
suggesting otherwise, until Apple banned the word Android from it's
App store and asked the finalists and winners of the Android Developer
Challenge to remove the award winning ribbon from the iPhone versions
of their apps. Imagine what you would think if you were a
hand-to-mouth developer surviving a recession and Apple limited your sales by
forbidding you from including awards your app has won on the pages consumers use to decide which app to buy.

This promise of "open" has attracted almost every handset manufacturer
on the planet and has generated startups as well. Though the most
interesting potential in our story lies with the black sheep. If Palm
stays true to form we will see them launch a handset running Android
before they risk loosing their cult. They did this during the rise of
Windows Mobile, a move which many analysts believe saved the company.
There is a sense of certainty amongst insiders that further declines
in sales would push Palm into the Android arena where Palm's 15 years
of experience manufacturing handhelds and loyal user base would give
the company a significant advantage against foreign manufacturers in
competing for market share.

While industry insiders still balk at the idea, RIM's Blackberry
Platform could also directly compete for market share by producing an
Android powered Blackberry. One might think that apps written for
Blackberry would be incompatible, but in Casablanca, no one is foreign
and the core applications of the blackberry user experience do not
contain functionality beyond the scope of the Android software stack.
Since Blackberry apps are written in Java, and though it would be no
small feat, creating a Blackberry app "wrapper" for Android that
adjusts differences in app framework architecture at download is more
than possible, it's within strategic reach if they see any sharp
decline in sales. Android's open architecture ensures the same is true
for Palm WebOS apps as well.

Applications that run from translated code would not loose performance
compared to apps written using the Android SDK because of a curious
feature of the Android software stack: every app is converted from
it's language of origin to Dalvik byte code at runtime. Casablanca has
no native tongue.

The final piece to account for in the Blackberry stack is made
possible by the Android Native Development Kit or (NDK) which contains
the elements necessary to implement Blackberry's Enterprise Security
layer natively on Android handsets.

Whether Palm and RIM know it or not, Casablanca has them covered.

The platforms out in the cold are Apple and Oracle. Oracle, which
purchased SUN Microsystems cannot assert ownership over the use of
Java as a language on the device as the SUN Java model has been to
charge per virtual machine (JVM) and have the tools for compiling
applications available for free. Making a claim to the operation of
Dalvik would fail because the handler that converts Java
to Dalvik byte code does not infringe upon the function of a Java
Virtual Machine. Developers are working every day to extend the reach
of Dalvik far beyond the handset. The JVM is not the most likely java
interpreter to land on a tablet or net-book. By removing costs and
distributing responsibility Android makes "open" work.

Though I don't believe it is possible, when I examine the
ramifications of a victory for Apple, I see a cold and bitter wind
rolling across hundreds of startups as they let go of their dreams and
yield to the company that only uses one network and forces everyone to
sync their contacts with a jukebox.

When I examine the ramifications of a successful defense of HTC, I see
a young industry on the move, where hundreds of startups mentioned
earlier are inventing things you would not believe.

Law and capital aside, I believe in R Buckminster Fuller's systemic world view. There is no zero sum, there just isn't. As we begin to
awaken to the truth that we live on a planet, a closed system where
there is no action that does not effect the whole, our factional tribes will
learn to work in the service of sustainable culture where the ongoing
pursuit of doing more with less will be the challenge of industry and
the success of one means success for us all. Where the stage has been
set for everyone to enhance the material efficiency of life with every
consecutive generation of hearts and minds which experience it. That's
a user interface worth protecting.