Tue 6 Nov 2007
Open Handset Alliance? Please…
Posted by Erik Starck under Google, Java, Linux, gPhone
[2] Comments
Platform battles… aren’t they fun?
Actually, they’re not. They keep a lot of innovation from happening. Will Google’s move to launch the alliance make the platform battle finish sooner than it otherwise would? Probably not. From that perspective, the Open Handset Alliance was a disappointment.
If you expected a cool device from Google, you should be also disappointed. What we got was yet another mobile linux initiative. Problem is, there are many mobile linux alliances out there, we don’t need another one.
It makes sense for a company like Google not to start building devices. As I wrote before, Nokia pumps out 11 phones per second and distributes them worldwide. They’ve probably sold a couple of hundred phones before you’ve finished reading this blog post. Feel like competing with that?
If it takes you one hour to decide, they’ve sold 40’000 devices.
Still feel like competing with that?
I didn’t think so.
No, Google is a software company and should remain a software company. Any software company that survives for some time becomes a platform company. Any platform company that survives for some time becomes an OS company. Maybe that’s where Google is today.
If anything good comes out of this, that would be a set of java applications or maybe even a java framework on top of MIDP. Can we hope for that? On November the 12th maybe we’ll know. Until then, disappointment is the word I’ll use to describe what Google launched.
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