{"id":63,"date":"2008-12-01T10:17:49","date_gmt":"2008-12-01T15:17:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bitquill.net\/blog\/?p=63"},"modified":"2016-05-12T14:50:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-12T19:50:00","slug":"revised-thoughts-on-android","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/revised-thoughts-on-android\/","title":{"rendered":"Revised thoughts on Android"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a title=\"First thoughts on Android\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bitquill.net\/blog\/?p=57\">post<\/a> 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. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>First, in a networked environment, it is common <em>standards<\/em>, rather than a single, common software platform, which further enable information sharing. So, <strong>Google may be doing Android for precisely the <em>opposite<\/em> reason than I originally suggested<\/strong>: to avoid the emergence of a single, dominant, proprietary platform. Chrome may exist for a similar reason. After all, Android serves a purpose similar to a browser, but for mobile devices with various sensing modalities.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, mobile is arguably an important area and Google probably wants to <strong>encourage diversity and experimentation which, as I wrote in a <a title=\"The long tail of ideas\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bitquill.net\/blog\/?p=14\">previous post<\/a>, is a pre-requisite for innovation.<\/strong> This is in contrast to the established mentality summarized by the quote I previously mentioned, to &#8220;find an idea and ask yourself: is the potential market worth at least one billlion dollars? If not, then walk away.&#8221; In fairness, this approach is appropriate to preserve the status quo. (By the way, in the same public speech, the person who gave this advice also responded to a question about competition by saying with commendable directness that &#8220;Look: we&#8217;ll all be dead some day.\u00c2\u00a0 But there&#8217;s a lot of money to be made until then.&#8221;)\u00c2\u00a0 But for innovation of any kind, one should &#8220;ask &#8216;why not?&#8217; instead of &#8216;why should we do it?'&#8221; as <a title=\"Amazon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Jeff Bezos on strategy &amp; innovation (not Kindle-related!) - Tech IT Easy\" href=\"http:\/\/techiteasy.org\/2007\/11\/20\/amazons-jeff-bezos-on-strategy-innovation-not-kindle-related\/\">Jeff Bezos said<\/a>, or &#8220;innovate toward the light, not against the darkness&#8221; as <a title=\"Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode - Wired\" href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/techbiz\/people\/magazine\/16-12\/ff_ozzie?currentPage=all\">Ray Ozzie said<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[45],"tags":[59,57,58,56],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scitech","tag-android","tag-mobile-devices","tag-opinion","tag-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7x9xm-11","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":714,"href":"http:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bitquill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}