the patent battles imposed by apple, oracle, and surely microsoft in the background have been making android steadily more expensive, as HTC found out -- they are now paying undisclosed sums to license technologies from various companies. so the pitch "android is free" is under attack -- and the more success it has in the marketplace, the more others will try to destroy it.
google has been feeling the heat with apple, microsoft etc thwarting its attempted purchase of nortel's trove of patents. it has even complained to the justice department that it is was under unfair competitive attack. i guess that was a pre-emptive tactic to get the SEC etc to easily approve this proposed acquisition of motorola mobility.
so where does this leave the big android OEMs, like samsung, htc etc? they now have to compete directly with google's branded phones, which prospect they probably do not appreciate. unless google keeps motorola mobility at arms length with a bamboo wall between the hardware and software arms. which may make a lot of sense.
4 comments:
Unlike the PC era, the mobile space will have not one or two but four or five players -- webOS, android, iOS, meego and blackberry-OS (most likely in that order). I hope all of them thrive and no one player will get to dominate and crush the rest.
webOS? unlikely to be first (altho i like palm and was a palmpilot user). meego is dead as nokia dumped it for winphone7. QNX (rim's new os) is sucking wind, as its latest gambit is to offer android app compatibility.
i think it'll be a three horse race: android, iOS and somebody else, in that order.
this is going to be an oligopoly.
OT: After virtually swamping India’s thermal power equipment market, China is now posing a grave threat to the fledgling local solar power equipment industry.
@Rajeev,
Add Mozilla to the list:
Engineers from The Mozilla Foundation are creating a browser-based system that would make a smart phone's operating system superfluous.
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