According to Sanjay Jha, COO of Qualcomm's chipset division, as quoted in this article in *The Register*<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/03/android_qualcomm/>, it was Google's goal from the outset to *create, *not reduce, fragmentation in the mobile software space with its introduction of Android. Qualcomm is, of course, a member of the Open Handset Alliance.
"Google *wants *fragmentation in the industry," according to Jha. Why? Maybe there's a clue in Robert Love's presentation at last summer's GUADEC in Birmingham, where he extolled a vision of the future where all data would be web-based and accessed through web-based applications (incidentally an area that Google has been pushing for a couple of years now.) This raised some significant objections, around areas like accessibility (Robert suggested that Google Gears could address this, which really begs the question of why one would base stuff on the web in the first place) but more significantly, on grounds relating to privacy and security (a pretty sketchy area for Google, to begin with). There was general agreement that putting corporate data on a Google-owned web-based resource would be not only foolish, but completely legitimate grounds for a quick sacking. Robert had no real response to this criticism. So, I'd love to hear from someone at Google about this. Was Android cynically intended from the outset to make life easier for Google by trying to marginalize the legitimate community-based efforts that it derided as being "not good enough" to meet its needs when it first started to think about the direction it wanted to take in mobile? Was it more that they weren't "Google-controlled enough" rather than "good enough"? Is Android mainly intended to be a stumbling block for the rest of the industry? What happened to "Don't be evil"...? -- 鏡石 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
