The post I wrote a few days ago about Android is all over the place. The right elements are in that post, but my composition and conclusions are somewhat incoherent. Perhaps I have been partly infected by the conventional thinking (of, e.g., various older, big corporations) and missed the obvious. Read the rest of this entry »

Update: I’ll keep this post for the record, even though I’ve completely changed my mind.

I recently upgraded to a T-Mobile G1 (aka. HTC Dream), running Android.  The G1 is a very nice and functional device. It’s also compact and decent looking, but perhaps not quite a fashion statement: unlike the iPhone my girlfriend got last year, which was immediately recognizable and a stare magnet, I pretty much have to slap people on the face with the G1 to make them look at it.  Also, battery life is acceptable, but just barely.  But this post is not about the G1, it’s about Android, which is Google’s Linux-based, open-source mobile application platform.

I’ll start with some light comments, by one of the greatest entertainers out there today: Monkey Boy made fun of the iPhone in January, stating that “Apple is selling zero phones a year“. Now he’s making similar remarks about Android, summarized by his eloquent “blah dee blah dee blah” argument.  Less than a year after that interview, the iPhone is ahead of Windows Mobile in worldwide market share of smartphone operating systems (7M versus 5.5M devices). Yep, this guy sure knows how entertain—even if he makes a fool of himself and Microsoft.

Furthermore, Monkey Boy said that “if I went to my shareholder meeting […] and said, hey, we’ve just launched a new product that has no revenue model! […] I’m not sure that my investors would take that very well. But that’s kind of what Google’s telling their investors about Android.”  Even if this were true, perhaps no revenue model is better than a simian model.

Anyway, someone from Microsoft should really know better—and quite likely he does, but can’t really say it out loud. There are some obvious parallels between Microsoft MS-DOS and Google Android: Read the rest of this entry »