Define “Win” ⇥ techcrunch.com

Mike Butcher of TechCruch chatted with Elon Musk. Most of the conversation is insightful and articulate, but this question seems out of place for how blatantly stupid it is:

Finally, I asked Musk who he thought would come out on top, out of Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook?

“It’s the grudge match,” he said. “It’s good for consumers that there is this battle. I think probably Google will win on the phone because Jobs is out of the picture.”

At what point do we call the match? Is it now? Next year? Three years from now?

Or does the competition end when only one company remains in business? In that case — given that Apple takes the vast majority of industry profits, with Samsung taking most of the rest — why would Google be the winner of the mobile phone space?