The market is still not fully mature with 40% of Americans owning Smartphones but over the next year or two there will be many more people replacing their current smart phones than entering the smart phone market. Those unsatisfied with their current offering are the ones most likely to move to something new. Therefore, it seems the Android is much more likely to kill off market share from everyone except iPhone. Since most smartphone manufacturers need to use someone else's software (I mean the # of manufacturers since they only have 23% market share between them), I suspect this means Window Mobile.
This is of course a US View and the market is much more open in most of the World. The key to maintaining market share is customer satisfaction. How many sidekicks would be sold now even if T-Mobile had them up for sale?
Civil engineering (clean water, sewer systems) are highly cost effective but this is not an issue in the US.
Lifestyle changes (stop smoking, lose weight, exercise, etc) are highly cost effective since all of those studies assume no cost except an occasional counseling session.
If someone is trying to claim preventative medicine saves money, then they either know they are lying or should know they are lying.
The medical savings theory rests of 2 premises. That low cost areas of medical care can translate to lower cost in high cost areas. This presumes the genetic makeup of the two populations are similar (they are not), that cultural issues are the same (they are not), and that all cost differences is due to greed of MDs, hospitals, and other health care providers.
None of the democratic proposals addresses the unique legal system that is probably responsible for a large amount of the excess US cost versus other countries but this is my guess as a neurologist as I see the extreme defensive medicine practiced in headache care which is 50% of my practice.
Another issue that no one in government wants to address (by the lawyers, for the lawyers) is the issue of malpractice law suits. Some patient will have a nursing note buried in their chart that mentions something that some lawyer will insist I should have read if I wanted to know everything about my patient before I treated them. It is not unusual for hospital admissions to produces hundreds of pages per admission and there is no one who is going to read and remember everything from each page.
If Apple goes to Walmart and says, "if you want to sell the iPod, you cannot carry the Zune" or if Apple goes to Walmart and says, "if you do not carry the Zune, you will get an additional $10 off each iPod you sell", then that would be illegal. I also believe that if they sold the iPods at a loss once they had a majority share in the market to put competitors out of business, that this would also be illegal. Being a monopoly, by itself, is not illegal.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff." -- Dave Enyeart