You know where a market for disruption exists? The millions of iOS devices that are now being relegated to the trash bin of tech. Very soon everything from iPhone 3GS and back will be obsolete. You will not be able to update apps or OS. I have a nice pile of iPod Touch units that I can't develop for and will not move past their last update (was it iOS 4.2-something?).
You don't have to build any hardware. It's already there. And it's nice too.
Provide a path for a Linux (or whatever) phone to be loaded into these devices and you instantly create a market for probably hundreds of millions of devices that will either end-up in the trash bin or forever forgotten in a desk drawer.
If I were Microsoft I'd throw money at making W8 Phone run as a viable replacement for iOS on these devices. And I'd make the software 100% free of charge. Instant access to millions upon millions of customers who will be facing a very real choice of having to spend hundreds of dollars to get a new iOS device or, instead, try W8 Phone for iDevices for free. Yes, apps will be important. For some, this will not work. For others it would be a no-brainer.
The same would be true of Google/Android.
If I could load something else onto my half-dozen now-obsolete iPod's I'd do it. Yes, I know you can Whited00r up to a somewhat crippled iOS5, but that's not really a solution, certainly not for a hundred million devices.
If I were Microsoft I'd throw money at making W8 Phone run as a viable replacement for iOS on these devices. And I'd make the software 100% free of charge.
Never, ever, ever going to happen. Apple would provide the access required to do that, so you'd need to reverse engineer the device in order to install a custom OS on it- something that Apple would likely take legal action against.
Add to that the perception that WP is a dead-end OS for crappy old devices, and you're ruined your brand too.
Android you can, with bulk surplus Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus phones because the binaries for the proprietary hardware have been released, albeit with very restrictive conditions on what you can do with those binaries, so distribution is out of the question unless you're selling for bitcoins.
iOS nothing has been released so you have to reverse engineer everything.
There is a project that tries to run Android on old iphones (iphone2G and iphone3G). I don't know just how functional it is but even if it was there's no way you could ran the latest version of android on that kind of (old) hardware).
And Microsoft would never, ever ever do something like that. I'm pretty sure they would face legal troubles if they did.
You know where a market for disruption exists? The millions of iOS devices that are now being relegated to the trash bin of tech. Very soon everything from iPhone 3GS and back will be obsolete. You will not be able to update apps or OS. I have a nice pile of iPod Touch units that I can't develop for and will not move past their last update (was it iOS 4.2-something?).
You don't have to build any hardware. It's already there. And it's nice too.
Provide a path for a Linux (or whatever) phone to be loaded into these devices and you instantly create a market for probably hundreds of millions of devices that will either end-up in the trash bin or forever forgotten in a desk drawer.
If I were Microsoft I'd throw money at making W8 Phone run as a viable replacement for iOS on these devices. And I'd make the software 100% free of charge. Instant access to millions upon millions of customers who will be facing a very real choice of having to spend hundreds of dollars to get a new iOS device or, instead, try W8 Phone for iDevices for free. Yes, apps will be important. For some, this will not work. For others it would be a no-brainer.
The same would be true of Google/Android.
If I could load something else onto my half-dozen now-obsolete iPod's I'd do it. Yes, I know you can Whited00r up to a somewhat crippled iOS5, but that's not really a solution, certainly not for a hundred million devices.