I'm an engineer as well. I would say that in interfaces especially, we converge toward best practices globally. Your customer is not happy to have to learn a hu

I'm an engineer as well. I would say that in interfaces especially, we converge toward best practices globally. Your customer is not happy to have to learn a hundred interfaces or switch interfaces when they get a new device or program. For instance, the VCR. Or Windows version bumps. Or the Ribbon. They prefer one interface to rule them all, like Logitech Harmony remotes, the browser, the command line, Emacs. The current market provides some evidence. http://searchengineland.com/comscore-android-nears-50-us-smartphone-market-share-95768 http://searchengineland.com/comscore-android-nears-50-us-sma... 70% of the smartphone market is in iOS and Android, two very similar smartphone experiences. RIM's distinctive experience is at 20% and falling fast (it was at 27% in March). WP7 is an also ran at 5%. Symbian is at 2%. Palm is not in the chart. If you believe those numbers, the contest is all but over. Every non-iOS non-Android experience is failing in the market. It may not be just because of their designs, but I think you have to believe on other grounds that UX/design is the major selling point for all smartphones. The second contender might be applications, and iOS and Android are the leaders there too, by a wide margin over the field. I think Google decided to beat Apple at its own game. Whatever you believe about how they used Apple's patented material (or not) or how valid the patents are (or not), clearly at some point a decision was made to compete with Apple not just on features, but also in UI polish and look and feel. And somebody probably looked at Apple and said, how can we top that? When they couldn't, they kept it as similar as possible for a variety of reasons: the patents were too broad to be enforceable, they could justify deriving the same concepts in a vacuum because they come from well known UX principles that predate the patents, the design elements were universals that all phones should have, they should lower switching costs from iOS to Android. I agree with you that Google could have gone its own way when designing a phone experience. But I don't know that that would have been a path to success. You would only have to believe the preceding paragraph to imagine that a think-different UX could have been worse for consumers.