You must live on Bizzaro World.
Licensing OS 9 to people who were making Mac clones was one of the worst decisions Apple ever made. It almost bankrupted the company.
They’ve got tons of competition now, and they’ve always had tons of competition. Apple computer sales make up a small percentage of the total market (hardware) and Windows obviously sells a hell of a lot more copies than OS X (software). The only sub-market where Apple sells more than anybody else is in notebooks, and even there they aren’t dominant, they just have a much bigger slice of that particular market than they do in other markets.
The iPod was far from the first digital music player to market. It has the majority market share now, but when it debuted sales were miniscule compared to the rest of the offerings out there. It took 3 years for sales to really take off. Its current position is due to good design — which is not really separable from good usability, IMO — integration with a good program for managing music, iTunes, which also serves as the portal to the most successful outlet for legally purchased electronic music files to date, the iTunes music store.
It is still not an uncontested market. Amazon opened a pretty successful music file store, that may do quite well against iTunes in the future. Other manufacturers continue to try to outdo the iPod in features. I think the high of the iPod market was a bit over 80% a year or so ago; it has fallen a bit since then.
With the release of the iPhone, Apple took on long-established cell phone manufacturers and software developers and made a product that made those old timers look embarrassingly bad in comparison. Analysts and industry professionals frankly expected Apple to fail because the competition was so tough. These guys didn’t even realize how strong the public response would be for it. The continuing good sales pretty much prove that it wasn’t just fanboyism and hype either.
The exclusive deal with AT&T (actually Cingular at the time) was probably not what Apple wanted. They’d already shopped around a bit looking for a company that would give them enough control over the back end that they could do things like visual voice mail. If you watched any keynote speeches or read interviews with Jobs about the deal, you can tell that he’s not all that enthusiastic about having to be tied to AT&T as a condition for getting the iPhone out there. I really don’t think they had a choice about it. The exclusivity contract was clearly a huge concession they had to make to get the thing done at all.
The vetting system for installed software is probably in both AT&T’s best interest and Apple’s. Carriers have already had problems with malware and they’re taking steps to head off future issues. Apple has a lot invested in this product, and a reputation for reliability, security, and ease of use.
I would prefer that development be more open than what was announced at the SDK release conference, but completely open software installations do pose some risk for them. Currently, though, no smartphone OS allows completely unrestricted installations.
Not that restrictions matters much. There are any number of cracks and exploits already for the iPhone. if you want to do them. But at least if you do that, you’re not going to be able to blame Apple for any problems.
I hope Android does well. Comparing Android to the iPhone is a little like comparing Windows and OS X though. They’re not exactly equivalent, though they’re sorta-kinda similar in some ways. From a security standpoint, Google is going to have to have some kind of vetting process just like Symbian or Windows Mobile has. IT people have already been bugging them for more details on how they’re going to do that.
The problem that Android has is what all the open source projects have: lack of focus. It’s a system developed by committee, and I think the only way it will be really successful is if a small group of people at Google are ultimately responsible for what things are adopted and what are dropped from the mainstream releases of it. Even at this point, the capabilities and development path of Android software are pretty vague. It’s still clearly a work in progress.