Obama's Shoulder Angels

The cherubic Mark Zuckerberg on one shoulder, and the death-like Steve Jobs on the other.

App markets

Lots going on in the mobile app market space, Google has a new market and is coming out with music and video marketplace. Windows Phone 7's market bans open source software (as has iTunes, though it is not enforced). And Apple has their new subscription service that requires content resellers to pay a 30% vig and offer the best price on their market.

It's easy to see which market is most open to developers and content providers.

Nokia

The Nokia / Microsoft partnership looks like two enterprises without a clue on mobile software development.

The iPhone is successful because of it's app ecosystem. iPhone apps are appealing because they are more responsive and engaging. iPhone apps are more responsive because iOS developers have more precise control, through Objective-C and C, of how their apps use device resources. Apple's smartest decision in iOS was to give developers access to the hardware, rather than mediating access through various virtual machines.

Most previous phone platforms used some form of the JVM and suffered for it. Java performs poorly in a client apps and is too much of a resource hog for embedded applications. Google tried to get around the problem with a careful re-implementation of the JVM in Dalvik, but Java's architectural problems show through and iOS apps just work better. Google has begun changing direction by beefing up their NDK.

Microsoft's problem is not a VM but Windows. Every mobile implementation they've done, including WP7, is too bloated for small platforms. And that is why Nokia's strategic partnership with Microsoft is doomed. Nokia's remaining strength is in low end phones, WP7 is too demanding to run on low end phones. Chinese manufacturers selling Android phones will own the low end, displacing Nokia.