Facebook Home and the next stage of iPhone vs. Android

The HTC One marks the beginning of a new battle between Android and iPhone.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

The home computing revolution of the 1980s and '90s was defined by a battle between two titans: Apple and Microsoft. After its IPO and the introduction of the Macintosh, Apple was riding high.

The company started losing the PC market in the '90s, though. Microsoft released Windows 3.0 as a cheaper alternative to the Macintosh in 1990, but it was the release of Windows 95, which brought a comparable GUI (graphical user interface) to PCs, that really hurt Apple. And Apple also suffered from a lack of vision, owing to the absence of its visionary leader, Steve Jobs, from 1985 until 1986, when he was brought back into the fold with the acquisition of NeXT.

While Apple maintained its approach of not licensing its OS to other manufacturers (except for a brief period during Jobs' absence), Microsoft distributed its OS to multiple manufacturers. And with the help of Intel, Windows machines proliferated. It has only been in recent years that Windows has weakened, thanks in large part to Apple's iPhone and iPad.

This "open" vs. "closed" (or "fragmented" vs. "integrated") approach has been the subject of much debate, given the very different tactics Google and Apple have utilized for mobile computing. Last month, The New Yorker's Tim Wu ... [Read more]