Create pro-consumer mobile technology and open up a new market of multi-platform and platform-agnostic users who want the best devices.
The Washington Post ran a great article on the increasing problems of vendor lock-in with tablets and mobile devices. In simple language it boils down the problem around why buying an app for one device doesn’t give you access to that app anywhere else; if you switch from an iPhone to an Android phone, you’ll have to re-buy your apps, and your iTunes content. This partially is lock-in, but there’s also a halo-effect - you can transfer an app from on iPhone to a new iPhone, or content from your desktop iTunes to your iWhatever - and the more devices from the same vendor, the better the system works.
But this is a horrible direction to take, and why I rarely buy apps or content from locked-down stores like iTunes. My desktop computer runs Ubuntu Linux, my tablet Android, and my phone is an iPhone. The media server for our house is a Mac Mini, and I finally retired my hold-out Windows computer last year. I refuse to buy music that I can only listen to on one of those myriad devices any more than I’d buy a CD that only plays in my car, but not in my home, or food that I could eat in the kitchen, but not in the dining room or on a picnic.
By and large, I’m a good target demographic - some discretionary income, a gadget afficionado, and generally plugged in to fun new technologies, but my market is rarely well served.
Give me cross-platform apps and restriction-free content, and I will pay for it (just ask Amazon’s MP3 Store, or my buying history at HumbleBundle).
This is a cycle of technology that varies between centralized control and wild and wooly user-led innovation, as I wrote about in January 2012 - here’s hoping that the increased media attention on the downsides of lock-in are heralds of a coming move back towards pro-consumer technology.