Structural Balance of Mobile Platforms
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2390394,00.asp
As Rim’s blackberry fades to the periphery of the mobile device market, we are left with three platforms with hopes of controlling the market share. These three platforms, Windows Phone, the Apple iOs and Google’s Androids are currently battling for platform supremacy. As with many sectors of the mobile market, this clash is manifesting itself in the for of patent suits. In the summer of 2011 Google claimed that Apple and Microsoft were waging a ‘Hostile, Organized’ patent battle against the Android platform. Over the summer, Microsoft and Apple teamed up on multiple occasions to buy wireless technology patents. Their cooperation is something unprecedented in the two companies long, heated rivalry. Realizing this Google’s David Drummond stated “Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other’s throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what’s going on.” Clearly the balance of power between the old guard of Microsoft and Apple is changing in the presence of a new legitimate competitor in a new market, with Google in the mobile device market.
When evaluating the situation as a structural balance problem, what currently happening should come as no surprise. At the outset of the development of a smarter mobile device market stemming from the advancement of cell phones, Google, Apple and Microsoft were all promoting their product while attack the other two. This lead to a network looking as such.
Here all three parties are enemies with each other. This by definition is not structurally balanced, thus the graph would eventually change, and with this new patent acquisition and suit it has. Now Microsoft and Apple are friends (on some level in the mobile device market). They are only becoming friends because of their mutual enemy, Google. When they become friends the structural balance of the relation ship between the three companies comes back into balance and can be represented as follows. 
With this new structurally balanced network we may have witnessed a turning point in the course mobile device market. The unforeseen collaboration between Microsoft and Apple may be only for an instance or could be a permanent change in the mobile device network structure between these three technological giants.