How Many Mobile Operating Systems Do We Need?

We are all familiar with the expressions:  "it will get worse before it gets better" and "it is always darkest before the dawn."  Maybe that will apply to mobile operating systems.

We now have at least seven major operating systems or platforms in play around the world:  Blackberry, iPhone, J2ME, Linux, Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile (in alphabetic order).   Several of these have real strengths that make them contenders for the final round.  Blackberry has a strong foothold in the enterprise; Apple has come on strong with iPhone in just one year; Nokia uses Symbian and is usually among the leaders; Microsoft keeps breathing new life into Windows Mobile, with version 9 due out next year; and now Verizon, a heavy hitter, has breathed new life into Linux with the announcement they would use this as their preferred operating system.

I would like to think the explosion of platforms results from the industry waking up and realizing the mobile internet is here and we need the right tools to seize the opportunity.  This is creating unfortunate confusion in the near term.  Application writers will need to choose which platforms to write for, and even then deal with the confusion about different devices having different screens, input, storage, processing power, etc.  Advertisers and media content providers are also  frustrated by the wide range of platforms, complicated by different media codecs and streaming rates.

My bet is the winner in all this will be web services, which users can reach from just about any device with a browser.  There will be some page-formatting challenges for a while, and we will still see fights about which web standards the devices will support, such as Apple's refusal to support Flash.  Once we get past some of these challenges, the focus on web services will benefit the users who will find it easier to access and manage their applications and data across the three screens (computer, mobile, TV), and will benefit the wireless carriers by doing more across the network rather than within the devices.