hahahaha
YEAH!
that is a great parallel...
injecting apples with orange juice to appeal to the "orange sector"


Hm...
I agree with you Dolphins may look like fishes even though they are completely different...
But there are many kinds of dolphins...and they all look and behave differently compared to one another...
THAT is diversity..
What we have going on with mobile os's is FAR from any form of natural or even artificial diversity...
It is more like the mono culture of a wheat field..
Nothing else thrives there...but identical stalks of wheat..
and that isn't natural ...

by that kind of artificial construct...
...all species of ...well...actually ....everything... should eventually meld into a grey goo...of convergence.
Convergence..
It's a load of crap.
It's just a good current term...for a human imposed construct that just isn't the norm in nature...
It's right up there with the 80's term "unconditional love"
(which is another load of crap...in nature there are always conditions...the mother of cubs or pups..or kittens..or whatever...kicks their progeny out when it's time...and drives them off to learn how to be an adult...sure there is love...but "unconditional love" ? ...another human construct...)

If convergence were natural ...Nature would have done so a thousand times over the last few billion years ...
I am not saying that convergence doesn't occur...
But really..
Strains of wheat aren't convergent...or there would inevitably be ...naturally ( before even the advent of humanity ...) only 1 single strain of wheat on the planet...
and likewise goes for just about everything else that grows, or gives birth.
There would be no diversity.
The platypus isn't a convergent creature...
Nothing is...
It is pure Darwinian "if gills don't work....chuck 'em and try bigger ears to hear with..or longer legs to run with..."

I used to just shake my head...
But I must admit a lot of words I hear now are creeping in to vocabulary ..that are ridiculous ...
or patently just do NOT belong...

For example...
When the Fcuk did the term "Ecosystem" infiltrate ??
How in hell did something as truly alien from nature as.. talk of mobile devices and operating systems...creep in and try to sound like it was a "natural phenomenon" ?????

Britannica :
Ecosystem: Definition:
"Ecosystem, the complex of living organisms, their physical environment, and all their interrelationships in a particular unit of space."

The only reason I can see for utilizing natural terms for something completely unnatural...is to try to give the unnatural some amount of purpose for existing side by side with what IS actually natural...
In the face of how incredibly destructive the process of making our devices are to the environment and to REAL ecosystems....
In light of that..It makes perfect sense to try to paint over the ugly process and usurp the term. Play up the importance of the artificial construct and try to diminish the scrutiny of the actual real world impact.

Ecosystem ...my eye.

rant concluded.