Originally Posted by
bigpics 
You forgot the Chromebooks. The ones that are now "adopting" a "more Windows-like" interface....
1. Google's never had any success in hardware. They had NO live support for their first directly-marketed phone. Period. And now they've bought a cell phone company that's had its own marketing and support woes and is far from being the leader in the field.
2. Their app and other product ecosytem is inferior not only to Apple's, but also Amazon's (and their forked version of of Android which takes people right to that system). And for tablet apps, it looks it'll be inferior to Microsoft's within a year of Win 8's launch, if not AT launch. MS looks to have three targets - most of the consumer range including the basic iPad range with WOA and the slightly bulkier but full Wintel business tablet - a segment in which they've repeatedly blown chunks - but they ARE taking a completely fresh whack at it. It might have a decent niche - or not. Hard to make the odds.
3. They make no money on the OS itself, though they're forced to spend a lot on iterating it. Ironically MS makes money on each copy of Android sold because of patent infringements, and Apple's bidding to do the same. How funny and poetic is that??
4. In
integratedhardware/software terms, they're caught where Gil Amelio was caught at Apple before Jobs returned, only in a much worse position - if they make devices (and they certainly own a device maker now) they're competing with their own OEM's to whom they depend on licensure for nearly 100% of their market share at present. If they quit licensing, they lose all their outside manufacturers, who need to be in the tab market and so will go with Windows. And at least Apple was still selling more Macs than any of their clone makers (if less than all of them) when Steve returned.
Apple voluntarily went from 10% of the PC market to 3% to end licensing. (In retrospect you see just how gutsy he was in making his bets.) Google would start at a tiny base of the Android market and no rep or cult following for any physical product bearing a Google label and not much more for Moto mobile.
So no "owning" of either "the majority" of the hardware OR software in sight. In fact, because of the open source provisions, another company like Amazon may end up doing better iterations of Android than Google. Or Samsung. To paraphrase Shakespeare (Marc Antony on Caesar), "You have heard it said they are ambitious..." Or....??
That's a lot of mountains to climb!
Great observation!
And I think you may be onto something important as well....
Except that there's even more at play. Unlike Apple's original media players, tablets are already becoming big in the Enterprise, medicine and all of business as well as education. The iPad's had great F500 acceptance (and Macs are almost mainstream there now). Plus IT still loves MS's breadth of product for their needs and their investment in it (software, equipment, and staff) - and one thing Win 8 will have is all kinds of hooks into all of Mr. Softie's huge Server, Exchange, Windows 365, Cloud and other Enterprise infrastructure - which is another mature and entrenched ecosystem, if of a different nature than Apple's - and Office will likely be on every tablet. And Google has no rep over that way to speak of. Google Docs, Google Schmocks.
Another big wall for Google to climb.
(the second time was win7
\
. so how are they going to get it right the first time on ARM?... they can't just recompile the code to run on a win8 (or Win 'ate' my profits
