Feel free to mark this post. In 5 years time I expect the iPhone platform's dominance to match or surpass the perception of eBay's stranglehold in the auction game. I'm almost willing to say "significantly surpass."

No one else (and I do mean no one else) is establishing a viable long-term platform other than Apple and Google at this point. Palm has been all over the map in the past 10 years. They're done. WinMo is a path to nowhere.

Blackberry will continue to do well in the enterprise market in the short term, but it's completely washed up before it even took off in the consumer space. I wouldn't be surprised to see a BlackBerry service running on Android and iPhone handsets in the future.

And Mark, about dev-tools, I'm not discounting what's available for Android/Linux, but the set of APIs for the iPhone is a much sweeter piece of cake. I don't expect Google to be able to ever match Apple on this front, no matter how much contribution they get from the open source community.

Again, console comparisons are irrelevant because none of the makers really define their products as a long-term platform. Sure, you could play PS1 games on a PS2 and you can play GameCube games on a Wii. Besides, the PS2 continued to outsell other newer consoles for a long time, including in software sales.

The mobile platforms are most comparable to desktop platforms. In that light, let's say iPhone will be where Windows is on the desktop and Android will be where Mac OS is. The other guys will carve out the remaining couple of percentage points between them.

BTW, Apple had (as of October of 2008) enough cash on hand to buy Palm approximately 37 times over and almost enough to buy RIM at recent trading prices. It's amazing how far they're going on what is compared to someone like MS, a shoestring budget. Anyone know how much MS has already bled on WinMo?