Jha's statement is the flip side of the famous Alan Kay line that Steve Jobs sewn into the very heart of Apple at the beginning: ?People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.? It's fascinated me that more tech companies haven't followed that philosophy over the years rather than taking the Microsoft approach.
Smart move by Motorola. The mobile market is relatively young and calling this futile is ridiculous.
No one can predict how the mobile landscape will look like in the next couple of years (unless you are a fan of android coming to the realization that your platform may be in jeopardy as major players defect...).
Unfortunately for Google and their legion of "open source is the only truth" fans, there will be more defections. A company like Motorola (or Sony/Samsung) has ambitions beyond being a simple commodity phone/tablet manufacturer going after low margins.
As Steve Jobs said recently, this post-PC era is not about tech specs. It's about the user experience.
Motorola is taking note
Somebody's got a bad case of Apple envy...and it's Motorola!
Motorola's co-chief executive Sanjay Jha also noted last spring during the company's earnings calls that "I?ve always felt that owning your OS is important, provided you have an ecosystem, you have all the services and you have an ability and the scale to execute on keeping that OS at the leading edge. And I continue to believe that at some point, if we have all of those attributes, that owning our own OS will be a very important thing."
And that's your cue Google, they all want their own OS, and Motorola is just the start. You're playing Microsoft old trick and you'll be getting the same result.
If they weren't such intolerable geeks, I would feel sorry for them. Nah...scratch.
NOTE to self and anyone reading:
The silence from Redmond is deafening (other than a lawsuit or 2)... and also that of HP's WebOS (what's happening and when?) in regards to this typical Google "beta-release" for tablets, marketplace, and phones.
I think they very well could be sitting on the fence and watching with interest how this "open source experiment" and AdMob OS plays out.
Moto is starting to get it.
HTC (link above) is looking for an answer to control their destiny.
RIM is gonna give a try of "straddling the fence the width of of fly-fishing line "... which will literally cut them out of the picture IMHO.
So what's up with out friends up north and on the "other side of the railroad tracks"?
Strategically speaking, and regardless of Apple's lead in the game which isn't going to go away any time soon... my business mind, heavily influenced by chinese warcraft wisdom, says, "...caution and patience. He who reels too fast, may lose big fish... and cry"*.
Well, that's because Palm had several bad managements who made many poor decisions. Otherwise Palm would have been great now since its expertise is mobile devices..
Yea, I'm all for competition, but once you get past 3-4 OSs, it gets a little ridiculous. I guess when all phones did was make calls and play solitaire, it didn't really matter. But smartphones are legitimate softawre platforms now...
It's smart of Motorola to not depend on another company for its business...but still, who's going to buy an OS made by Motorola?!
What really ridiculous is if we buy smartphone when all we need is to make calls and play solitaire, a 'dumbphone' should have been enough. But then who knows, perhaps we'll find things we can do more if we bought one.
Why should Motorola sell its own OS? What really important is to have OS that it can fully control, and to differentiate itself from the rest of the competition. Licensing the OS is another headache in the future.
Well, they certainly don't after seeing what happens with life under a monopoly supplier like Microsoft.
It has been shocking to see the degree to which they all did flock to Android. But then as Asymco said.. a coalition of losers don't get to make perfect choices.
It has been shocking to see the degree to which they all did flock to Android.
Not really. Nokia, Motorola and other prominent smartphone companies at that time were caught with their pants down. The iPhone was a game changer and they had to retaliate with something. Hence, most of them jumped on the Android bandwagon as little choice was left, the OS was "free" and offered the closest thing to a contender (obviously since Android was a shameless imitation). With Android, Google basically lowered the barrier to entry and opened the gates to any manufacturer willing to build a device (a blessing for a company like HTC).
"The report noted that Motorola's efforts to develop an alternative to Android may relate to the uncertainty of Oracle's ongoing patent and copyright claims against Google's mobile operating system, which is modeled upon aspects of Java ME."
Smart move by Motorola. The mobile market is relatively young and calling this futile is ridiculous.
No one can predict how the mobile landscape will look like in the next couple of years (unless you are a fan of android coming to the realization that your platform may be in jeopardy as major players defect...).
Unfortunately for Google and their legion of "open source is the only truth" fans, there will be more defections. A company like Motorola (or Sony/Samsung) has ambitions beyond being a simple commodity phone/tablet manufacturer going after low margins.
As Steve Jobs said recently, this post-PC era is not about tech specs. It's about the user experience.
Motorola is taking note
Well for developers iOS must be looking more and more attractive as the storm brews on the non-iOS horizon.
The first reason is glaringly obvious. The Oracle lawsuit is the death knell for Android. It's an airtight case, with legal precedent and the Android source code itself as evidence. Microsoft already lost their battle to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" Java. They paid Sun $20 million back in 2001, and were forced to take their JVM off the market.
Now Google will lose that same battle. They have blatantly copied and attempted to profit from the work the Java team has done. Stealing, then giving away software for free isn't "open" in the sense Rubin was hoping to imply.
And there's another reason. Google has Microsoft-like poor taste and judgement when designing user experiences. (Need I mention the short-lived Google TV as an example?) Google, like Microsoft before it, figured that users will put up with terrible UIs and ugly designs, but for very different reasons. Users put up with Windows' hideous convolutions because they had no choice. Corporate IT put the pee cee on their desk at work and said "Our way or the highway."
Now, Android users put up with the generic-aisle look and feel because, oh well, it's free. But the problem runs far deeper than just a cheesy interface. The whole infrastructure is cheesy. The Android market is full of malware and porn, and Google hasn't provided a real alternative to iTunes yet (and likely never will.) Why? Why does Google seemingly not care about the user experience?
The answer is simple. The only user experience Google actually cares about is the AdMob ads delivered to users. Google's real customers are their advertisers. Google makes 96% of their profits from ads. That's why Android is free. To maximize the number of eyeballs on AdMob ads. And that's why Google has promiscuously done deals with every Tom, Dick, and Harry generic hardware maker, including Motorola. To maximize the number of eyeballs on AdMob ads. Let the manufacturers fight over tiny margins. Let them push each other off the low-price cliff. Let them eat cake.
Motorola bought Azingo, but all they get is an OS development team. They'll be bringing a newborn baby OS to a superb user experience plus deep infrastructure fight. Against Apple, a deeply entrenched, fast-moving, hardened veteran and undisputed champ of the user experience battle. Good luck Moto. You're gonna need it.
Terrific post. Except for one minor quibble: it won't be 'cake' they'll be eating.
What does the comment about the os they bought is on linux, same as android. I think windows mobile is silverlight on top of windows ce, am I wrong on that?
I know iOS is unix, and android is a vm on top of Linux, and I believe hp web os is Linux based as well though I'm not sure how much Linux actually comes through to the user level.
Of all the major phone operating systems I think iOS is closest to being a unix distribution.
Android (and webOS) does use the Linux kernel, but that's about it. What's usually referred to as "Linux distros" are most often "GNU/Linux distros" as they combine the Linux kernel with GNU userland (desktop environment, tools, etc). When it comes to UNIX certification, Linux itself (being just a kernel) can't qualify, though some distributions do get compliance (notably missing are Debian and derivatives - including Ubuntu). I highly doubt Google and HP are going to full POSIX compliance. OS X is compliant (as is QNX, which RIM is now using, but they're probably not worried about breaking compatibility), and it's very likely that iOS is as well (as it only differs from OS X in the GUI layer).
TL;DR - iOS, Android, webOS, and PlayBook are all Unix-derived, but only iOS is definitely compliant to the POSIX standards, PlayBook likely as well, but I don't know the extent of what they've done to QNX.
Palm made every possible mistake they could have and turned themselves into something very much not like a company that is, ?really serious about software should make [its] own hardware.?
Licensing clones (a mistake that Apple briefly made but fortunately pulled back from), splitting into separate software and hardware companies, and so on. The worst possible decisions on practically everything, Palm killed itself by not following that advice.
Just because Android is essentially 'free' is no reason to not invest in alternate technology. Its a wise move by motorola to seek out alternatives to Android, if only to differentiate themselves from the multitude of Android clones. Also, who knows what shit google could pull in the future and the backlash that Motorola and others would face due to Googles handling of users information and privacy.
The first reason is glaringly obvious... Good luck Moto. You're gonna need it.
Enjoyed the commentary.
I have a colleague who is so disparaging about the iPad and iOS, which I believe he hasn't yet even tried, that I have thought about buying him an iPad and saying, 'try this, write an honest commentary on it and you can keep it, otherwise give it back'. Either way I cannot lose and who knows, he might just learn something. \ (The risk of course is that his honest commentary might be equally disparaging. That's a risk I'm up for!)
I have a colleague who is so disparaging about the iPad and iOS, which I believe he hasn't yet even tried, that I have thought about buying him an iPad and saying, 'try this, write an honest commentary on it and you can keep it, otherwise give it back'. Either way I cannot lose and who knows, he might just learn something. \ (The risk of course is that his honest commentary might be equally disparaging. That's a risk I'm up for!)
Long time Mac users are used to having friends/family/colleagues who malign the Mac and Apple in general without ever having used any of Apple's product. They all seem to have a friend of a friend of a friend who runs a big IT department who has said that "nobody who is serious about computing uses a Mac".
Comments
Jha's statement is the flip side of the famous Alan Kay line that Steve Jobs sewn into the very heart of Apple at the beginning: ?People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.? It's fascinated me that more tech companies haven't followed that philosophy over the years rather than taking the Microsoft approach.
Palm? Look where they are now.
Smart move by Motorola. The mobile market is relatively young and calling this futile is ridiculous.
No one can predict how the mobile landscape will look like in the next couple of years (unless you are a fan of android coming to the realization that your platform may be in jeopardy as major players defect...).
Unfortunately for Google and their legion of "open source is the only truth" fans, there will be more defections. A company like Motorola (or Sony/Samsung) has ambitions beyond being a simple commodity phone/tablet manufacturer going after low margins.
As Steve Jobs said recently, this post-PC era is not about tech specs. It's about the user experience.
Motorola is taking note
Somebody's got a bad case of Apple envy...and it's Motorola!
Motorola's co-chief executive Sanjay Jha also noted last spring during the company's earnings calls that "I?ve always felt that owning your OS is important, provided you have an ecosystem, you have all the services and you have an ability and the scale to execute on keeping that OS at the leading edge. And I continue to believe that at some point, if we have all of those attributes, that owning our own OS will be a very important thing."
And that's your cue Google, they all want their own OS, and Motorola is just the start. You're playing Microsoft old trick and you'll be getting the same result.
Sweet, sweet Fandroid tears!
Want to wallow in some more Android fan misery?
HTC locks down Incredible S against custom ROMs too, starts a fight with its best friends
If they weren't such intolerable geeks, I would feel sorry for them. Nah...scratch.
NOTE to self and anyone reading:
The silence from Redmond is deafening (other than a lawsuit or 2)... and also that of HP's WebOS (what's happening and when?) in regards to this typical Google "beta-release" for tablets, marketplace, and phones.
I think they very well could be sitting on the fence and watching with interest how this "open source experiment" and AdMob OS plays out.
- Moto is starting to get it.
- HTC (link above) is looking for an answer to control their destiny.
- RIM is gonna give a try of "straddling the fence the width of of fly-fishing line "... which will literally cut them out of the picture IMHO.
So what's up with out friends up north and on the "other side of the railroad tracks"?Strategically speaking, and regardless of Apple's lead in the game which isn't going to go away any time soon... my business mind, heavily influenced by chinese warcraft wisdom, says, "...caution and patience. He who reels too fast, may lose big fish... and cry"*.
*OK. Bite Me... I made it up "on the fly".
Palm? Look where they are now.
Well, that's because Palm had several bad managements who made many poor decisions. Otherwise Palm would have been great now since its expertise is mobile devices..
Somebody's got a bad case of Apple envy...and it's Motorola!
It's not just Motorola, but also everybody else in the industry.
Yea, I'm all for competition, but once you get past 3-4 OSs, it gets a little ridiculous. I guess when all phones did was make calls and play solitaire, it didn't really matter. But smartphones are legitimate softawre platforms now...
It's smart of Motorola to not depend on another company for its business...but still, who's going to buy an OS made by Motorola?!
What really ridiculous is if we buy smartphone when all we need is to make calls and play solitaire, a 'dumbphone' should have been enough. But then who knows, perhaps we'll find things we can do more if we bought one.
Why should Motorola sell its own OS? What really important is to have OS that it can fully control, and to differentiate itself from the rest of the competition. Licensing the OS is another headache in the future.
Nobody wants to rely on a single supplier."
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
Well, they certainly don't after seeing what happens with life under a monopoly supplier like Microsoft.
It has been shocking to see the degree to which they all did flock to Android. But then as Asymco said.. a coalition of losers don't get to make perfect choices.
It has been shocking to see the degree to which they all did flock to Android.
Not really. Nokia, Motorola and other prominent smartphone companies at that time were caught with their pants down. The iPhone was a game changer and they had to retaliate with something. Hence, most of them jumped on the Android bandwagon as little choice was left, the OS was "free" and offered the closest thing to a contender (obviously since Android was a shameless imitation). With Android, Google basically lowered the barrier to entry and opened the gates to any manufacturer willing to build a device (a blessing for a company like HTC).
"The report noted that Motorola's efforts to develop an alternative to Android may relate to the uncertainty of Oracle's ongoing patent and copyright claims against Google's mobile operating system, which is modeled upon aspects of Java ME."
FUD...
Oh Hai !!! Where've ya been!
What excellent posts today. I have really enjoyed reading this thread. No trolls in sight...
Shhhh don't rustle the grass there's one on this thread, lying low at the moment...
Smart move by Motorola. The mobile market is relatively young and calling this futile is ridiculous.
No one can predict how the mobile landscape will look like in the next couple of years (unless you are a fan of android coming to the realization that your platform may be in jeopardy as major players defect...).
Unfortunately for Google and their legion of "open source is the only truth" fans, there will be more defections. A company like Motorola (or Sony/Samsung) has ambitions beyond being a simple commodity phone/tablet manufacturer going after low margins.
As Steve Jobs said recently, this post-PC era is not about tech specs. It's about the user experience.
Motorola is taking note
Well for developers iOS must be looking more and more attractive as the storm brews on the non-iOS horizon.
The first reason is glaringly obvious. The Oracle lawsuit is the death knell for Android. It's an airtight case, with legal precedent and the Android source code itself as evidence. Microsoft already lost their battle to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" Java. They paid Sun $20 million back in 2001, and were forced to take their JVM off the market.
Now Google will lose that same battle. They have blatantly copied and attempted to profit from the work the Java team has done. Stealing, then giving away software for free isn't "open" in the sense Rubin was hoping to imply.
And there's another reason. Google has Microsoft-like poor taste and judgement when designing user experiences. (Need I mention the short-lived Google TV as an example?) Google, like Microsoft before it, figured that users will put up with terrible UIs and ugly designs, but for very different reasons. Users put up with Windows' hideous convolutions because they had no choice. Corporate IT put the pee cee on their desk at work and said "Our way or the highway."
Now, Android users put up with the generic-aisle look and feel because, oh well, it's free. But the problem runs far deeper than just a cheesy interface. The whole infrastructure is cheesy. The Android market is full of malware and porn, and Google hasn't provided a real alternative to iTunes yet (and likely never will.) Why? Why does Google seemingly not care about the user experience?
The answer is simple. The only user experience Google actually cares about is the AdMob ads delivered to users. Google's real customers are their advertisers. Google makes 96% of their profits from ads. That's why Android is free. To maximize the number of eyeballs on AdMob ads. And that's why Google has promiscuously done deals with every Tom, Dick, and Harry generic hardware maker, including Motorola. To maximize the number of eyeballs on AdMob ads. Let the manufacturers fight over tiny margins. Let them push each other off the low-price cliff. Let them eat cake.
Motorola bought Azingo, but all they get is an OS development team. They'll be bringing a newborn baby OS to a superb user experience plus deep infrastructure fight. Against Apple, a deeply entrenched, fast-moving, hardened veteran and undisputed champ of the user experience battle. Good luck Moto. You're gonna need it.
Terrific post. Except for one minor quibble: it won't be 'cake' they'll be eating.
What does the comment about the os they bought is on linux, same as android. I think windows mobile is silverlight on top of windows ce, am I wrong on that?
I know iOS is unix, and android is a vm on top of Linux, and I believe hp web os is Linux based as well though I'm not sure how much Linux actually comes through to the user level.
Of all the major phone operating systems I think iOS is closest to being a unix distribution.
Android (and webOS) does use the Linux kernel, but that's about it. What's usually referred to as "Linux distros" are most often "GNU/Linux distros" as they combine the Linux kernel with GNU userland (desktop environment, tools, etc). When it comes to UNIX certification, Linux itself (being just a kernel) can't qualify, though some distributions do get compliance (notably missing are Debian and derivatives - including Ubuntu). I highly doubt Google and HP are going to full POSIX compliance. OS X is compliant (as is QNX, which RIM is now using, but they're probably not worried about breaking compatibility), and it's very likely that iOS is as well (as it only differs from OS X in the GUI layer).
TL;DR - iOS, Android, webOS, and PlayBook are all Unix-derived, but only iOS is definitely compliant to the POSIX standards, PlayBook likely as well, but I don't know the extent of what they've done to QNX.
Palm? Look where they are now.
Palm made every possible mistake they could have and turned themselves into something very much not like a company that is, ?really serious about software should make [its] own hardware.?
Licensing clones (a mistake that Apple briefly made but fortunately pulled back from), splitting into separate software and hardware companies, and so on. The worst possible decisions on practically everything, Palm killed itself by not following that advice.
... Can they not grasp the concept of open source? And then ironically the OS they bought is built on Linux just like Android."
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
What interest does Google have in open source? More like open source... wink, wink, say no more!
The first reason is glaringly obvious... Good luck Moto. You're gonna need it.
Enjoyed the commentary.
I have a colleague who is so disparaging about the iPad and iOS, which I believe he hasn't yet even tried, that I have thought about buying him an iPad and saying, 'try this, write an honest commentary on it and you can keep it, otherwise give it back'. Either way I cannot lose and who knows, he might just learn something.
Enjoyed the commentary.
I have a colleague who is so disparaging about the iPad and iOS, which I believe he hasn't yet even tried, that I have thought about buying him an iPad and saying, 'try this, write an honest commentary on it and you can keep it, otherwise give it back'. Either way I cannot lose and who knows, he might just learn something.
Long time Mac users are used to having friends/family/colleagues who malign the Mac and Apple in general without ever having used any of Apple's product. They all seem to have a friend of a friend of a friend who runs a big IT department who has said that "nobody who is serious about computing uses a Mac".
... and so it goes with iOS.