The original article makes an excellent point, and expresses it with a great deal of coherency: the reluctance of computer makers to engage in operating system development is based on an outmoded fear that was established in the days where interoperability was hard because we hadn't yet figured out things like open document formats, open network protocols, portable APIs, portable language runtimes, and virtual machines. A lot has changed since then, so why are they still so reluctant?

This is an excellent question.

Your response seems to have a very tenuous grasp on coherency. I'm trying to pull out what you're trying to say. It appears to hinge on the transitive verb "to matter", and I can find only one introductory paragraph where the author uses this verb, and he doesn't say anything objectionable the two times that he uses it:

He says that hardware and software both matter. I find that hard to refute. Then he goes on to say that if you asked him to say which matters more, he'd say software. I'm not surprised that he would say this, since he tends to be a "user experience" guy and I'm willing to grand him this premise for the rest of what he wrote.

Honestly I can't tell what counter-argument you're trying to make. Yes, Google has been successful. It certainly wasn't because of their hardware. Regardless, you're only responding to the setup of the thesis, not the thesis itself.