James, I'm on a Branch kick this morning. I agree with your point, I just want to escape 140 characters to have a better conversation. What do you think is the bigger picture?

You can't compare Android & iOS based on hardware sales profit, since Google, and Amazon for that matter, are not hardware companies, they are selling devices near cost in order to increase the marketshare and,by extension, the number of users consuming their products.

Apple is really only as good as it's next hardware product. Apple has been doing well at this over the past several years, the hardware dynamic is going through a change. Hardware is becoming very inexpensive to produce and the value people are placing on that hardware is being driven down as well.

This leads me to the heart of my earlier statement that Google has won and Apple has lost.

Google has a huge advantage in this space because they have the one thing Apple doesn't have, mountains of data. Simply use Google Now and you can easily connect the dots of why this is so important. Google voice search, coupled with Google Now, is far superior to the capabilities of Siri, though I believe Siri's purpose is slightly different than that of Google Voice Search/Google Now (goo.gl).

Apple's ability to execute large scale cloud services and produce collaborative, contextualized services as rapidly as Google leaves them lagging behind.

Agreed. Having worked at both companies, I'm a bit torn but I agree with your 'google has the data' comment. This is backed up by the lastet iMaps mess.

However, I'm not sure it's a winner-take-all scenario. I can see both companies going strong well into the future: each will find their niche.

Hi James & Scott, Sorry I am late to the Branch party on this conversation but I was out and about.

When I saw James' first tweet yesterday, I found myself sad to be agreeing and for somewhat different reasons that stated above, which is:

I don't want to live in a world where everything I 'own' is delivering me ads. I live without a TV for a reason. If we argue that Google has indeed 'won', then Android is in essence a frame for ads.

The mobile revolution that I love is so much more than that.

I will agree with Scott's statement just above that it is not a static winner-take-all scenario. The tech world moves so fast that if Google has won a battle or even the war that it and Apple have been fighting the last five years, then the win is merely a kudos for winning the last five years.

I am just waiting for a Chinese mobile phone(s) with its own OS (not iOS nor Android) that outsells both and is completely opaque or baffling to those of us who don't read & understand Chinese.

I agree, that I don't care a great deal for the device being a frame for ads, but I simply don't see a scalable way around this. Since I see no way around this at least Google is providing me a great deal of value in exchange for the ads, but I am not getting this same value from iOS and I see that platform as a frame for ads also.

I would love to see a scalable way to monetize that doesn't involve ads.