Michael Mace has written about the war between Nokia and Apple, and how “When two elephants fight, the loser is the jungle.”

The winner is hopefully going to be us, the developers. When platforms fight, they tend to get more desperate and do things to spite the competition. They will all crave developers.

The Apple-Nokia war finally got underway on August 29, when Nokia announced an array of new music-capable phones and an online music store. The two companies had been eyeing one-another like wrestlers outside the ring for more than a year. Apple entered the mobile phone market, but only in the US, where Nokia is a non-factor. Nokia openly declared that it’s a computing company (link), but its non-phone products so far have been different flavors of lame.

But the August 29 announcements put Nokia and Apple on a path to direct confrontation. I haven’t seen a lot written online about the importance of this conflict. I think that’s probably because many of the people who follow Apple’s business closely are based in the US and have trouble taking Nokia seriously because it’s a secondary player here. Meanwhile, Nokia’s most ardent followers are in Europe, and look at Nokia’s actions in light of its regional conflicts with SonyEricsson and the European mobile operators.

But when you stand back and look at what’s happening in the industry worldwide, it’s clear that Apple and Nokia both want very badly to be the dominant mobile computing company for young adults. That makes a huge, relentless conflict between them inevitable. They’re like two armies trying to take the same hill. One’s coming from the west, the other from the east, so there’s not a lot of fighting at the moment. But as soon as they reach the hill, there’s going to be an explosion.

Michael goes into great depth on:

• What Nokia announced, and why it matters
• The new phones
• Apples new products
• Relative strengths of the competitors (Or, how to piss off both Apple fans and Nokia fans in the same post.)
• How they’ll fight
• A shift from hardware design to systems design
• The operators lose control
• What does it mean for users?

Only a brief mention of Microsoft, and no mention of Android.