Yes that was an interesting read, and although the article makes a number of good points about Android being hijacked (from Google's point of view) it is a bit selective in presenting its argument. Whilst making the point that Google has given anybody the tools to turn out a great phone and even go as far as to strip out all references to Google in the core, the article fails to discuss if the alternative (to do nothing, not produce a phone OS) would have been more profitable in the short, medium or long term for Google. iOS was never going to be the prevalent mobile OS in China, India, Africa or South America because of the cost, and Android handsets can get further down the social scale because they are cheaper.
As for complete forks, I'd be surprised if this wasn't discussed as part of the whole open sourcing decision. And don't forget that there is an overhead to maintaining that fork as Android moves forward - to refactor all links to Google out of the OS will require a group of people to look at *all* the code on *every* release and come up with work-arounds and replacements that are good quality. The alternative is that every phone ends up being stuck on, say, Android 2.2, even those being released in two years time. That's an overhead that has to be factored in each time you want to start releasing phones with a later version of the OS. I'm not sure if that has legs in our modern "keep cost at a minimum and profit maximum" world. The main point this article fails on though is that even with an Android fork cleansed of Google, a significant percentage of applications installed will still be serving adverts. What they have really achieved is to give the world a ubiquitous and highly successful mobile operating system with thousands of developers giving away (or charging very little) for applications that push Google- supplied adverts. Does the loss of revenue from search advertising outweigh the potential of hundreds of millions of Android based phones serving in-app adverts in markets they otherwise would not have been able to penetrate anything like as effectively? Phil. On Nov 22, 10:02 am, Fabrizio Giudici <[email protected]> wrote: > On 11/22/2010 06:15 AM, Steven Herod > wrote:>http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/11/did_google_train_its_own_enemi.html > > I've read some similar articles in the past days. Well, I don't know: > it's fun to read articles where Google is a business genius and at the > same time others where Google is a moron (this is very different from > the debate "friend of the humanity" vs "big brother", since the latter > is about intentions, thus speculation, while smartness in business > should be easier to spot). > > My point is with that iPhone reference: Google must pay Apple for having > Google in the iPhone. Without Android, we'd probably have 90% of > smartphones made by Apple, thus Google should pay for 90% of the > smartphones. With Android, Apple will be confined to - say - 30%. Thus > Google will be forced to pay a third of the previous amount. Of the > remanining 70% of phones some will ship with other search engines, ok, > but not all of them; if 50% of the smartphones still ship with Google as > search engine, it's a win. My numbers are just an example to get the > point. Let's not forget that the beef is also with other services, such > as ads, and not only for the search engine. > > China is most likely to be the biggest problem since Google has to face > with a market + a government. > > -- > Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager > Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere." > java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici -www.tidalwave.it/people > [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" 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/javaposse?hl=en.
