Cell phone market is too big. The amount of money attracted the biggest and strongest players into this arena. Lots of marketing competitiveness and economic strategies are vying for advantages: really fun to speculate over a good glass of alcoholic drink.
There are 4 main forces shaping this market place:
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First there are the handset makers. Nokia, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, and Motorola are the giants and there are hundreds of smaller players looking for a fraction share of the market. Strategies fall into two general categories: targeting general population or specific segments. There are companies specializing, for example, “black label” handsets that are customer-made for a specific client, usually with a large field personnel that used to carry pager in the old days. These handset are hard-wired for a carrier, stripped of unneccessary features (camera, mp3, etc.), and come with standardized parts and services. Whatever the strategy, the handset manufacturers pursue a single objective: to differentiate. They must be different, preferably unique, in some ways: pricing, features, color, form factor, software, contents, etc. IPhone reaches the pinnacle of this objective.
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The carriers have a different strategy and objective altogether. They pursue market share, use volume, and the ARPU (average revenue per user). Carriers are usually a monopoly for a country or is part of an oligopoly (joint monopoly of very few entities). Market share is usually not an interesting factor. They want users to use more services and higher priced ones too. When carriers introduce new services, they want all handsets to support them. For this reason, carriers do not really like handsets to differentiate themselves too much. In fact, they push handsets to conform to standards that they control.
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Next come the content providers that crave for attention: movies need watching, music needs listening to, web pages need browsing, etc. There are various business models, all of them depends on the number of eyeballs. Some of the content providers think the handset is similar to the TV set in the living room, with more personal data and interactivities. Most of them standardized on one or two formats and rely on third parties to create “players” for their contents.
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Last are the developers that create the software (most likely games) that run on either the carrier side or the handset side or both. They need the carriers to at least distribute their bits and collect money from users. They exploit the most of the hardware capability provided by the handset. They can usually create several versions of their software for the most prolific or “cool” handsets. They don’t mind handsets being different, just good enough to show off their latest creation.
Goggle eventually wants to make money off Android. Since the customers do not seem much benefits from one handset OS to another. This is a supplier side question? Which one of the 4 players will pay? How much?
I will leave the question as an exercise to you the reader.