Selling Software: What Apple's Competition Is Doing

Google, having heard anecdotally that hands-on use of its Chromebooks greatly enhanced users' understanding of what they did and why they might want to buy one, is following Apple's strategy of improving the frequency of that hands-on access by opening physical store locations in which to enable customer access to its products in a demo-ready, functional environment. Google will surely sell more ChromeOS this way: people will start to become aware it exists.

By contrast, Nokia is following Microsoft's lead by bribing developers to support "Windows Phone 7" (or whatever it's called these days). And I do mean bribe. Nokia goes beyond Microsoft's platroem-software-plus-development-software-plus-even-yes-the-phone-hardware offer and doesn't just make development access free, it buys development. What else is a "cash incentive"? What other platform's vendors are so desperate as to guarantee third-party developers a minimum return?

Between these two strategies, I'm betting on Google's.