Random ramblings about some random stuff, and things; but more stuff than things -- all in a mesmerizing and kaleidoscopic soapbox-like flow of words.
It took a long time for Linux to become mainstream in mobile phones, but Google realised they needed a strong platform to develop on the smartphone market, bought the company behind Android and, after a few months, the G1 was born. Now, copying the pervasiveness strategy that Microsoft took for the OS in personal computers, Google is producing an OS that will be massaged into different smartphones with different features, always making sure they provide as many Google services as possible. Why hasn't Microsoft mobile been successful in doing that? Well, first of all, they have been, as you can see in the purple cheese below:
Notice the Linux market share is only 1/4 the size of Microsoft's share. But Microsoft bases their revenue on selling the OS to the phone manufacturer, and don't have much vested interest in what services are provided by the phone. Whereas if you want your services to work on the smartphone, you allocate your resources to make sure they do. Symbian has the same issue Microsoft has: they are not strong in providing services. On the other hand, Apple (red) has successfully been doing very good iPhones previous to the Android birth. They do have a couple of very important services to offer: music and video content. But Apple will always rely on Google's efforts to have maps, mail and docs. So they rely on that in the same funny way they rely on Microsoft's Office, which is a pain to their strive for OS success. Apple in the smartphone sector is what the IBM in the PC sector was before Microsoft and the PC clones...
The touchscreen HTC Magic will feature a 3.2 Megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, and GPS, but no slide-out keyboard.
Labels: open source
