The one of the nicer prob­lems in mod­ern life these days is that there’s too much choice. Name a product and there are at least three altern­at­ives vying for your atten­tion with their respect­ive thumbs stuck in dif­fer­ent parts of the growth-share mat­rix. Hell, name any­thing and that’ll hap­pen. Unless you’re nam­ing American Banks*.

In a month where Google Chrome was released to the rap­tur­ous cries of “why?” from people that were per­fectly happy with Firefox and maybe not so au fait with the under­ly­ing ideas of mar­ket forces and innov­a­tion, there is definately a case where a wide choice is very obvi­ously a good thing.

Mobile phones — sorry, I’ll cla­rify that — Mobile SuperWebCameraMP3ColdFusionReactor phones are pos­sibly one of the few excep­tions right now. There’s tech­nic­ally choice out there to com­pete with the IPhone, but no mat­ter how much they may protest, any­one that has a Blackberry or Prada phone will find their eyes slip­ping across to watch the bloke sit­ting next to them on the Tube play­ing Monkeyball on his Jobs machine.
In the short term, Apple are sor­ted. There is noth­ing real­ist­ic­ally out there to ITouch the IPhone in terms of pure desirab­il­ity — and if some­thing more tech­nic­ally adept comes along, it’s going to have a struggle against HMS Apple and her Great Marketing Armada. But then there’s Google’s upcom­ing Android.

The first poten­tial genu­ine com­pet­i­tion to Apple is com­ing along soon, and to my mind is look­ing goooood. It does all the things I per­son­ally want from a SuperWebCameraMP3C… mod­ern phone (I can’t be the only one that spent most of my time think­ing “why do I want that?” on the IPhone spe­cific­a­tion), it isn’t try­ing to com­pete with the IPhone dir­ectly, but modi­fy­ing the bet­ter ideas and run­ning with them in their own dir­ec­tion. And like Chrome, this bad boy’s open source — let­ting any Rod, Jane or Freddy have a muck about with it and see what they can bring to the party.

THIS is com­pet­i­tion! One com­pany chas­ing another doesn’t help — it just increases the chance of run­ning down a tech­no­lo­gical cul-de-sac. Companies going in dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tions with the same basic premise can only be a good thing — mis­takes made, les­sons learned, cross fer­til­isa­tion of ideas blah-de-blah — the product type as a whole benefits.

The IPhone isn’t the per­fect phone for all users, neither is Android — the know­ledge that someone some­where else could be just about to come up with some­thing bet­ter is what drives the innov­a­tion onwards and make the next gen­er­a­tion that little bit bet­ter. Is Google/the Open Handset Alliance** primar­ily out to take over the IPhone’s mar­ket? I don’t think so — just like I don’t think Google are try­ing to take over Firefox’s share of the browser mar­ket with Chrome — but they’re mak­ing the right people try harder, and that’s surely going to be to the bene­fit of us all.

I’ve ended posts like this before, but as much as I try to prop­erly under­stand Google’s under­ly­ing long term strategy, the more I think that they genu­inely are out to make the future the one with all the rocket packs, hover cars and robot man-servants.
Just before they crack out the 20-Foot Destruct-o-bots with the web enabled Death Rays…

^{*Zing!
**Anyone else hope these guys all meet up in a space sta­tion hov­er­ing about the planet all wear­ing capes?}