Mobile Confusion

With last week's release of the 3G iPhone, things are really heating up in mobile software development. My inbox is flooded with announcements--Nokia going open source, Google phone rumors, Windows Mobile device releases. It's funny, but with these announcements comes a feeling of industry-wide willful ignorance and hypocrisy.

For instance, the entire industry has acknowledged that fragmentation has been and is a major problem (particularly for developers) within the mobile space, but this doesn't seem to be stopping anybody from developing proprietary solutions to the problem or fighting over market share. If fragmentation is such a problem for developers, how can all these companies be so busy developing software to help developers with fragmentation? Doesn’t fragmentation make *those* developers’ jobs difficult? Everyone wants to be the one who solves the problem, but each “solution” compounds the problem.

Perhaps most amusing is watching how the latest iPhone is struggling with some very Microsoft-esque problems--especially for existing iPhone customers. Sound like a Windows upgrade nightmare? Yep. I’m no fan of Microsoft per se, but does the fact that Apple is now experiencing these problems prove that absolute power *always* corrupts absolutely? Or does it just go to show that Apple was never that innocent to begin with?