Tablet - Telephone Convergence
What the author misses is the fact that a convergence of sorts is taking place between smartphones & tablets - "phablets" if you will. In that game, iOS is far superior to both Androids & Windows. Most Android users have different versions of the OS on their phones and tablets and the user experience across these platforms is in-consistent. Even more so if the hardware comes from two different manufacturers i.e. there is both hardware & OS fragmentation. And from the point of view of enterprise support, trying to cater to the needs of large numbers of users with different versions of Android and on varying form factors - phones & tablets - will be a cost driver and an upgrade hell. A nightmare in short.
According to Google's own statistics, 54% of users are still stuck on Gingerbread (Android 2,3, released in 2010) and only 2,7% are on the latest Android version 4.1 - a.k.a. JellyBean. To this complexity, one needs to add in the confusion that will result due to different firmware and operator skins that sit atop the OS. Few enterprise IT shops will be able to develop cost-effective support models for this chaotic situation. Google has now attempted to stem this fragmentation by changes to the legalese in the for using the SDK - but I doubt that will have any immediate impact. Other than driving heavyweights like Samsung to OSes like Tizen.
This situation is not the same as the DOS vs MacOs battles of the early 80s. Microsoft retained full control over the software releases and the APIs such that there was no "forking" of the OS. Hence, hardware variations had minimal to no impact for the end user or the IT support shop.
That is not the case now, the combination of hardware & software fragmentation for Android will result in difficult to support IT assets and poorer quality apps. A situation the tightly integrated iOS avoids.
