Yes, just like Word was too late versus Wordperfect (dominated the market at the time).
The history of business is dominated by products and services that had virtually unassailable positions getting overtaken by rivals.
This is true, but there need to be exceptional circumstances to facilitate something like this. In the case of WordPerfect, Novell bought WordPerfect, and development halted for a full year. Novell basically let WordPerfect die, and ended up selling it to Corel. Corel then slowly brought it back to life, but by that time WordPerfect was behind two full years of development and Microsoft Office had ample time and opportunity to take over the market.
I'm a bit sceptical myself that WP7 will overtake iPhone. Apple is just really good at marketing, both word of mouth and traditional. Android still has to prove itself, IMO, but still has quite a lead despite being the weaker opponent (currently) to WP7. Still, I would not be surprised if they got it together. They have a much better focus and strategy this time around. But it might be similar to Zune versus iPod. Superior in many ways, but can't overcome the advertising and momentum of the iPod.
iPhone is just the superior product. They've given consideration to what's important about a phone long before many others did, and then sold that idea in combination with their already strong position with iPod's and iTunes. Right now, there is still nothing 'superior in many ways' out there. Everything has its strength and weaknesses. It will take a significantly stronger product to overtake an existing market leader, and time.
Biggest thing I'm looking forward to at this E3 will be Sony and MS's motion control announcements.
Mostly Microsofts, as Sony has already done a bit of reveal. While we're still mostly in the dark about Natal.
There still fairly similar in that we've not seen the whole thing for either. For both, we've only seen the tip of the software iceberg I'm sure, but we've seen much less still from Natal, so that's why it gives the impression of mostly being in the dark. I predict a lot of announcements for both in terms of software, and also a lot of third party support. We'll definitely see publishers jump at the opportunity to put the experience and investments in Wii controls for their games on to the HD platforms, as at least some of them probably feel they didn't earn back their Wii investments.
While you could argue that they should expect the same for the HD consoles, the Motion controls are the new 'next-gen' consoles for the short term, and combined with the HD consoles being more friendly towards third party software, developers are probably going to be all over it. The biggest risk for them is that it may take a long time for the motion controls to sell sufficiently, but that's partly a reality they can shape themselves, and in terms of investment it's not nearly as bad as a proper next-gen. You can simply upgrade existing titles, and sell games that can be controlled with default controls as well.
Besides that we'll also definitely see some genres like RTS reappear, and I suspect there is a big chance that some of the MMOs we've been expecting have been held back in order to support Move (at least the Sony ones, maybe not FFXIV). I think especially Sony will announce launch dates for MMOs close to the Move launch this year.
I don't know if both companies are ready to talk about 3D yet, but Sony will definitely have some 3D stuff to play, and probably also one or two things that support both Move and 3D. Very possibly a lot of their big titles will support either one or both of these, but few of the big titles will actually require either - that's probably too soon and too big a gamble.
All three will definitely have some new network services stuff. The rumored premium service that does not relate to actual online gameplay that's been rumored for PSN seems very likely to happen. Some kind of XMB and/or NXE changes seem almost inevitable for both, partly to support the motion controls better, partly to better handle the growth of services presented there, though I don't expect either of them to have as shocking a layout change as NXE was for the 360.
I expect a tonne more to be announced this summer, and I definitely have more things than I have time to write about rightnow, but it will be interesting to see how much stuff we'll get at E3, and what will be held back until the shows in Europe and Japan.
