If you are standing still, you are falling behind

This article in Vanity Fair seems to capture a defining moment in the tech sector, where the great monopoly of the desktop falls by the wayside. Not to a cooler, more secure, more stable OS (yes, I'm talking about Unix), but to a new paradigm. Just like mainframes gave way to the PC,

Cool is what tech consumers want. Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft.
No, really.
One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975. In the quarter ended March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation, $17.4 billion

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The lion's share of Microsoft's profits come from Microsoft Windows and a host of programs included in the Office Suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint). Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Google: Round 2 -- Mobile
Apple slogs ahead with the "design to win" philosophy. Google is doing something similar to what same Microsoft did in the last century, with the Android mobile operating software, except they giving it away for free instead of with a for-profit license.
In this new world, open source, free and cool trumps the pay-for-it model. Google just wants us to use Android so they can sell advertising. Apple wants consumers (not businesses) to buy their products because they are designed flawlessly and they are awesome.
Some companies rise, some fall. Not every one is a winner. But as long as we keep getting cool new toys, cool new ways to interact with each other, better ways to live and work, we -- the consumer -- win.