Had Palm's management not had a series of stroke-like horrible decisions, I can imagine a present where the PalmOS 5.0 clusterfuck and just-barely-good-enough Treos gave way to WebOS devices that could have recovered the company, and the iPhone would have had to compete against _that_ potentially much more solid platform.
All these years later, I still wish I could have sat in on those meetings and told Palm management just how badly they were screwing themselves.
Until people can really understand what I said above, and clearly they still can't, this kind of stuff will always happen
The biggest players in the industry released failed handheld platforms for 20 years before Android.
That theory does not explain the failure of all the other prior attempts by other monopolies