
Neither Microsoft, Nokia, nor anyone else should fork Android. It’s unforkable. - AndrewDucker
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/neither-microsoft-nokia-nor-anyone-else-should-fork-android-its-unforkable/
======
stusmall
The "android isn't very open source" sentiment really bothers me and I see it
a lot here. It is a complete and fully functional mobile OS under extremely
permissive licensing. Pull it! Change it! Build it! Fork it! Whatever! AOSP
_is_ open source.

Look at the closed source services google adds. As far as I know they are all
related to google services(Someone please correct me if I'm wrong). Their
store, their maps, their email, their location services. This isn't needed in
the open source distro and it works great without them. Also there are a lot
of restriction on the brand and how you use it when release an Android
product. That isn't unique to Android. See firefox vs iceweasel.

Sure sometimes it gets annoying that a lot of Android design decisions are
made behind closed doors and in working in the framework sometimes I have to
play the game of "Guess what the Google engineer was thinking" because
documentation can be scarce. Also from what I've heard sending changing
upstream isn't an easy process. These things are nice and make it an easy
product to work with... but aren't required for it to be truly open source.
The code is there in a series of open git repos and under Apache license. That
is open source in my book.

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
I think the issue is that all of those Google services are really what makes
Android Android. An Android phone lacking integration with Gmail, Google
Calendar, etc, without something else to make it compelling (like the Kindle
Fire), would be a pretty tough sell I think.

~~~
hrkristian
You could say the same for GNU. What is Linux without a DE? And a fancy DE
like GNOME Shell pulls in _a lot_ of dependencies, the latest furore in that
area is GNOME&systemd.

Difference between systemd and GMS is, developers aren't making money off of
systemd being in their control, Google relies almost wholly on it for Android
profits.

Android is a _fully_ functional Linux based operating system. To expect GMS to
just be handed out like it was a keg party flier without considering the
actual economic reality of running Google is ridiculous.

OEMs like Samsung weren't fooled back in ~2004 to think they'd get an amazing
OS for their phones for free, and the deal Google is offering is beyond
amazing compared to how other (tech) firms do business. imo.

~~~
drdaeman
Wait, isn't GNOME a part GNU Project?

------
SideburnsOfDoom
Microsoft is just not going to abandon Windows Phone, for fundamentally these
reasons:

"If it's a core business function – do it yourself, no matter what."
[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/programming-is-
hard...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/programming-is-hard-lets-go-
shopping.html)

MS certainly will view "a computer in every pocket, and all of them running MS
Software" as core to their future. If they _do_ abandon Windows phone, it will
be because that has changed.

In the meantime, MS is a company with a track record of plugging away until
version _x_ of the product is good enough to succeed.

~~~
fidotron
You forget "Embrace, extend . . "

The other mobile ecosystems are now so far in front they have no viable option
other than the embracing and extending. Android happens to be flexible enough
at the software layer (not just licensing) to make such a thing remarkably
easy to do, given the resources.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> The other mobile ecosystems are now so far in front they have no viable
> option other than the embracing and extending.

That's your opinion. I doubt that it would get any traction inside MS.

It just doesn't make sense - are MS more likely to take the android kernel and
reskin it to look like WinPhone, or continue to believe that writing OS
kernels is a core company competence ... which it is, really. If one day MS
could not write OS kernels any more they would be in serious trouble. It's a
core business function, so they do it themselves.

How would re-skinning android help MS get "in front" anyway? They have
technically solid product in Windows Phone, they need other things to make it
win, and they know it. Hence, the whole Nokia deal.

~~~
SifJar
"they need other things" \- like the extremely strong app eco-system of
Android (in comparison to Windows Phone, specifically). WP is a strong OS with
some great design choices etc (IMO, obviously); it's main downfall from my
point of view is the lack of apps. Forking Android (not necessarily just
"skinning" but a step beyond that) is an obvious solution to that issue.

~~~
x0054
The entire article is all about how it's not really an obvious solution at
all. Amazon is forking Android, and they have rewritten many of the GMS APIs,
and yet, many of the apps do not run on Kindle Fire like they do on Android.

------
cwyers
I want to like the article, because the idea that Microsoft should fork
Android is kinda silly. The idea that nobody should do it is even sillier,
though.

The article, in the course of explaining why it can't be done, names two major
examples of where it already has been done successfully -- Amazon's Kindle
ecosystem and any number of Chinese OEMs. It doesn't mention other (admittedly
less successful) forks, like B&N's Nook tablets or the Ouya. It also doesn't
mention how far along the road Samsung was to having the ability to ship
Android without Google Mobile Services, until Samsung and Google made a peace
treaty that involved sending Motorola off to live with Lenovo.

Yes, if you fork Android, you lose Google's ecosystem. It's not impossible to
duplicate, though -- Amazon's done it, Samsung just about did it. And
Microsoft already owns all the things it'd need to do it -- that's how Windows
Phone has an ecosystem. Losing Google's ecosystem isn't the downside of
forking Android, it's the entire point.

Once you've done it, though, you need to convince people to use your fork
instead of Google's. Microsoft's success at prying people towards Windows
Phone and away from Android can basically boil down to:

1) The ability to run on lower-powered and thus cheaper hardware and still
provide a polished experience, and 2) Nokia's build quality.

Switching OS cores to AOSP instead of the current Windows Phone OS wouldn't
entirely solve Microsoft's app problem (look at the Amazon app store), and it
would piss away the only competitive advantage their platform (as opposed to
their OEM partner) has against Google's Android experience. Microsoft isn't
Amazon -- they aren't a cloud company looking for an OS to give to consumers,
they already have an OS. They just need to make their ecosystem more
appealing, and giving up on Windows Phone now wouldn't do that.

~~~
recuter
> 1) The ability to run on lower-powered and thus cheaper hardware and still
> provide a polished experience, and 2) Nokia's build quality.

The Moto G has put a price floor on things. Even if Microsoft/Nokia could
limbo under it, why would anybody buy a basically-the-same Nokia for $150
instead of $179 Real Android? Its too late, these are commodities.

~~~
cwyers
You can get a Nokia 520/521 for a little over a third of $150.

~~~
recuter
From its wiki page: "The price was halved to $50 (£70 in the UK) for the
holidays"

So its $100 and only roughly comparable. And that's rather my point, few
people from developed countries will opt for it to save $79.

~~~
cwyers
From "developed" countries? No. From countries with subsidized handsets,
maybe. But Europe is certainly "developed," and that's where Windows Phone is
making its biggest inroads:

[http://www.zdnet.com/windows-phone-takes-more-of-europes-
sma...](http://www.zdnet.com/windows-phone-takes-more-of-europes-smartphone-
market-amid-signs-of-a-nokia-comeback-7000021335/)

------
wambotron
I don't have much to say about the forking issue, but it want to say this: I
own and LOVE my Windows Phone (Nokia Lumia 822). I started on android (Droid
X) after deciding the iPhone was too small, bought another one (Droid Razr
Maxx), and finally ended up at Windows Phone after playing with it on some
online simulator.

I wouldn't go back to android or ios. I don't think they're as usable or fit
me as well.

Anecdotally, my wife also joined me on Windows Phone recently after dropping
her android phone. She started on iPhone, lost it, was gifted my Razr Maxx,
then broke it. She liked the UI of ios, but loved Swype on android and said
she'd never go back to ios. Then while we waited a couple weeks for our phone
upgrade, she played with my phone and ended up really liking it. She now says
it is her favorite phone (Nokia Lumia 920). She likes the camera and the
excellent apps from Nokia.

Obviously I don't want MS to switch to android. There may be more apps, but so
many are of such poor quality that it is entirely irrelevant to me. Same goes
for the apple store. It's almost overwhelming how many bad apps there are.

~~~
tmzt
What feature or features of Windows Phone drive you to love it? How would you
to describe the experience in relation to Android or iOS?

Are there multiple web browser options?

~~~
wambotron
Live tiles, arranging my start screen to show exactly what I want without
having to open any apps, I think is the single biggest feature that I love
about WP. I also love the text prediction and correction when typing. I
haven't seen any other mobile OS do it as well.

Android and iOS are pretty much one and the same for me. They do similar
things and they come stock with a very similar UI. I'm not big on the list of
icons/folders and multiple pages setup.

Regarding ios7, I don't like the new text-as-button thing they have going.
It's hard to find them sometimes. I also really dislike the difference in pre-
ios7 apps and ios7 apps as far as UI goes. It's jarring to me. It'd be like
having a windows XP window pop up in Windows 8, or an OS9 window pop up in
OSX.

I am also not a fan of the all-caps ios keyboard. Windows Phone keyboard
displays the characters exactly as they're about to appear, but in ios they
are always capitals (just differently sized) and it makes for a good bit of
errors for me. I still have an ipad with ios7, so I interact with it second-
most of all mobile operating systems.

~~~
tmzt
Do you think an alternative launcher for Android that featured a similar
approach to live tiles would capture that advantage? As opposed to all the
Newton/Palm style launchers out there.

~~~
wambotron
I suppose they could, but every good launcher I had on android wanted
donations or an up-front + theme fee. The best android devices are really
expensive, whereas you can get a brand new windows phone for wicked cheap
(mine was $50 when I got it, my wife's was free).

------
fidotron
It's not a poor idea at all. The main example used to be Amazon, but now it's
China. China are going to be the source of a lot of Google headaches, thanks
to their inability to operate there leading to a majority of Android devices
shipped there not including their services at all, giving a critical mass to
the market for applications without their components.

Hugo Barra ended up at a Chinese company (Xiaomi) and Google just invested in
Lenovo, but unless there's a big policy change on the way the Android/China
beast will get further and further out of control.

MS absolutely should weigh in with a privacy hardened Android with great
Exchange and Active Directory support (and Nokia Maps). It would be huge, and
it would force Apple and Google right on to the defensive.

~~~
DrPizza
But it would have lousy app compatibility... so what advantage would it offer
over Windows Phone?

~~~
fidotron
It would have about as lousy app compat as the Kindle Fire, which is to say
nothing like as much as Google would like you to believe.

I'll say it: the Amazon APIs are actually better than some of the Google
equivalents too. MS can play exactly the same game, but with the muscle of
small business users.

Windows Phone simply has negligible actual interest from the dev community
because it's too much of a technical island, and tied to the whole Metro
disaster.

------
Oculus
This has been an ongoing cycle for all of Android. First people complain about
Android lagging behind iOS so Google starts moving their services to GSM so
they can avoid having to send updates through manufacturers. Then people
complain Google isn't open enough so they start baking it into ASOP which
takes forever to rollout. On the cycle goes..

~~~
AndrewDucker
An alternative would be to use GSM as a shim, that just calls through to AOSP
if the functionality is there, or fills in the functionality if it's not.

But I'm not seeing the advantage to Google of doing that - as everyone gets
GSM if they go for the major phones.

~~~
vetinari
There is one factor that causes what's going into GMS and what into AOSP, that
the article conveniently glosses over:

Functionality in GMS requries server side support. It can be computational
capacity or server-side dabatases (fused location with wifi and cell towers?
Google caller id? Map tiles? Storage? Server side push? Cloud support for
games? All of them require something on the other side of connection).

Unless someone is willing to step in and provide this, there will be no AOSP
equivalent.

~~~
wyager
>Functionality in GMS requries server side support.

Really? My calendar client, mail client, and launcher require server side
support from Google?

~~~
vetinari
Launcher certainly does - where do you think that Google Now prepares it's
data?

Launcher without Google Now is part of AOSP.

Both Calendar and Email are available in AOSP, Play Store has their binary
builds for those that for some reason do not have current Android version.
They can have at least current apps.

~~~
wyager
They could have made google now a plugin.

Calendar and email in AOSP suck.

------
rbanffy
Microsoft could build a fully functional Mono-based Windows Phone experience
on top of the AOSP core minus the Dalvik VM.

The only question would be "what for"? They'd gain nothing from it. They
already have a more or less portable kernel upon which they can build phones.

~~~
ahomescu1
It sounds to me like what they need is exactly the other way around: Dalvik VM
+ all the Java APIs in Android, on top of the WP kernel (or they could go with
Linux, but I think the kernel doesn't matter as much).

~~~
Maarten88
This.

But there is one problem with that strategy: if Microsoft would support
running Android apps on Windows Phone, there would be little incentive left to
write native WP apps. Everybody would only write for Android, making it hard
to differentiate the platform.

~~~
contextfree
I wonder if it would be feasible to support Java and maybe some (most? some
well-defined base of?) Android APIs in "native" Windows apps, in a similar way
to how JavaScript and HTML are supported via WinRT's notion of language
projections. Although this would mean narrowing the goal from "making Android
apps run on Windows" to "making Android apps easier to port to and maintain on
Windows".

------
higherpurpose
The author mentions "you can have control or compatibility, but not both".
That's basically another way or saying "you can fragment the platform all you
want, or choose compatibility (i.e. let Google control the platform across
OEMs)". Remember when people were yelling from the rooftops "Android is so
fragmented, and why it's always behind iOS! Google, give us standardization
already!!"?

Linux' biggest problem has been that Microsoft moved much faster to get
Windows on as many PCs as possible through certain corporate deals, but in
terms of gaining market share, the Linux ecosystem has also worked _against_
itself, but allowing everyone to fork it into hundreds of different
distributions, all doing different stuff, and with barely even a weak app
store across several distributions.

Linux is "everywhere", _because_ everyone can fork it, and Android has
certainly benefited from this strategy in the early years, too, but that seems
to be an antithesis to an "ecosystem". As we can observe, even though "Linux
is everywhere" in all sorts of devices, there's no significant "ecosystem".

Google wants to keep and evolve the Android ecosystem, because that makes it
much easier for users, and also developers to develop on top of a well
standardized ecosystem of devices and OS images. I guess for an proper
ecosystem to thrive, it needs to be controlled and standardized as much as
possible, with restrictions for OEMs and carriers.

The only alternative for the others, if they really want to start from the
Android base, will be to form their own ecosystem, but that's very hard,
unless we get to the point where only the web matters on mobile devices, too.

~~~
_pmf_
> The author mentions "you can have control or compatibility, but not both".

Or you can be like Apple, controlling everything while still taking the
liberty of shitting down developer's throats (who are delighted to be at the
receiving end, for some reason).

------
ZeroGravitas
Dianne Hackborn (who works on Android) responds in the comments:

[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/02/neithe...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/02/neither-microsoft-nokia-nor-anyone-else-should-fork-
android-its-unforkable/?comments=1&post=26199423#comment-26199423)

------
avenger123
The title is a bit of a linkbait for sure. I don't think anyone at this point
can say that Windows Phone is a non-player. It's going to be around and it can
only get better.

Suggesting that Microsoft would fork Android is more wishful thinking than
anything else.

Why not just say - "Android is unforkable" and leave it at that.

~~~
jeroen
From [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/07/satya-
nade...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/07/satya-nadella-
mobile-windows-phone-android) , which is linked at the beginning of the
article:

"To add to all the advice being ladled out to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s new
chief, here’s another piece: stop bothering with Windows Phone. It’s a waste
of money which will never pay off.

Instead, focus the efforts of Microsoft and soon-to-be subsidiary Nokia on
forking Android .."

So at least someone with an audience is saying that MS should fork Android,
and Ars is responding to that.

~~~
x0054
People with an audience say all kinds of idiotic things. Arguing that
Microsoft should fork another OS is like saying that Ford should license the
Toyota Prius design and concentrate on their core competency of putting Ford
badges on cars.

------
pmelendez
Well since that is a comment that pop up in here very frequently (that Nokia
and now MS should fork Android) I am very happy to see that I am not the only
one who thinks that would be a bad idea.

------
briandh
This piece seems to imply that only full source compatibility with Android
(including Play Services) would be valuable to the Windows Phone platform. I
don't think that's the case. I think getting 80% of the way, combined with the
Microsoft brand plus quality devices Nokia would be enough to entice plenty of
developers to the platform.

I think a more interesting question is whether Microsoft should fork AOSP as a
whole, or place an Android compatibility layer atop Windows Phone, a la
BlackBerry 10.

------
Zigurd
Amazon has obviously forked Android successfully and has sold a lot of
tablets. OPhone is an Android derived OS used in China, and other Chinese OEMs
without access to the Google ecosystem have to do similar things.

~~~
cwp
Amazon is a special case. They don't care about compatibility, since they're
building a very focused, special-purpose platform of their own. Like the
original iPhone, the Kindle is attractive enough that people will buy it
without any apps. Android was just a way for them to cut their time-to-market.

Microsoft has a different set of problems. Windows Phone is already shipping,
so adopting Android would actually delay the next release. What they need is a
stronger ecosystem—more apps to bring users and more users to bring
developers. Adopting Android might help them achieve that, but at the cost of
ceding control to Google. At the end of the day, why would anyone buy Android
from Microsoft instead of Google?

If they can't make a success of Windows Phone, MS would be better off to just
can it and provide apps and services to both iOS and Android.

~~~
cwp
Another fork of Android that makes sense is Firefox OS. They take the Android
kernel and drivers to get hardware compatibility, and layer a new set of APIs
and apps on top of it. They don't care about compatibility, because they're
interested in promoting web technologies rather than selling hardware,
promoting services or making money from licensing.

~~~
ahomescu1
I wouldn't exactly call Firefox OS an Android fork. Android is more than just
the Linux kernel, it's also Dalvik and a large set of Java APIs. From an app
developer perspective, the language and APIs matter much more than the kernel;
Firefox OS is completely different from Android in this regard.

------
DannyBee
Oh, another Peter Bright ("Microsoft Editor at Ars Technica") clickbait
article. Yay. The author of such fine pieces as:

"Firefox ships, but we shouldn’t really pay attention"

"Android OEMs should hear Microsoft, Nokia out on Google-Motorola combo"

"Android tablets may provide sales, but profitability is another matter."

etc

Sadly, judging by the old argument rehash going on here so far, it looks like
it's working :(

------
erikb
Hm. It sounds a little like Google would be doing really bad to seize control
over their infrastructure. But since they do, the whole Android world has
improved, at least in my opinion. Think about the upgrade complains we had a
few years back. As far as I know that's gone now.(?) So I think it's actually
good what Google is doing in that regard.

From my own experience with developing FOSS is also that other people don't
try to integrate their solutions into your system. Everybody heads off and
makes their own stuff.

Stupid forking is no problem for a project like GCC. But Android is a brand
name. And if other people fork it and head off doing their own stuff and fail,
then it is always Android that fails.

And really as a developer I also fight for the freedom of software, but as an
end user I want to be able to go to a shop and buy an "Android phone" and it
just works. Therefore, yes, please, Google take control! Good job!

------
mpettitt
Interesting article. I'm intrigued as to how CynaogenMod handles the lack of
Google Play APIs - it seems to be skirted around on their website.

~~~
AndrewDucker
If you run it on your existing phone then it extracts the Google Play apps
from it and re-uploads them afterwards.

However, their new phone is actually certified, and therefore gets them
"properly": [http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/12/19/the-oppo-n1-is-
offic...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/12/19/the-oppo-n1-is-officially-
the-first-google-cts-certified-cyanogenmod-phone-can-run-google-apps-suite-
officially/)

~~~
mpettitt
That's, hmm, interesting from a competitive and privacy advocate perspective.
It means that whilst Prism Break and similar websites are advocating it, the
key parts which report back to Google are still in place, since they aren't
the bits being replaced.

------
qwerta
Many companies produce Android devices without google maps, gmail, play
store... It solves a lot of privacy issues.

In 5 years smartphones will be cheap commodity and there will be also good
opensource community fork. I can see Debian on Android.

~~~
cdibona
Five years? You can buy smart phones for 30$ in shenzhen electronic malls
today. I don't know your threshold for cheap, but considering feature phones
sit at 25 to 20 in the same places.. The future is now :-)

~~~
mikecane
>>>You can buy smart phones for 30$ in shenzhen electronic malls today.

1) That's in Shenzen. Might as well be Mars for most people. When Shenzen
hardware is sourced by global brands, they usually have a generous markup
where that "$30" quickly disappears.

2) How long do they last? "Oh, but they're cheap. If it breaks in 3 months,
just buy another!" No. People just don't want to go through possibly losing
data and having hardware just suddenly drop dead on them.

So, yeah. I'll go with the guy who said five years. That's for stuff that
won't drop dead in three months.

~~~
_pmf_
> That's in Shenzen. Might as well be Mars for most people.

Ah, yes, if only some smart people could invent some kind of global network
for people to buy things remotely, and created some site where you could order
these things. They could call it, for example, Ali Baba.

~~~
mikecane
Still Mars. Unknown companies, unknown quality, unknown warranties (as in
mostly non-existent). And sending it back to China to exchange a defective
unit? Suddenly that $30 isn't.

~~~
vidarh
A wide range of these products are available at reasonable markups via a
variety of Amazon Marketplace resellers.

That's how I got my first one. But since then I've started ordering direct
from Alibaba/Aliexpress and for many products the savings are large enough to
"self insure" and still be worth it with a good margin.

------
edderly
Interesting analysis but I think he overcomplicates the situation.

From a third party app point of view you can build your against Android API
level X, or a corresponding ‘Google api’ release associated with the given API
level. An app built against API level X will work seamlessly on the
corresponding AOSP release.

So far, unless you’re interested in more tightly integrating into Google
services, you don’t need to build your app against the Google api, but
obviously Google are interested in app developers using their custom apis.

As far as the increasing integration of core applications into GMS is
concerned, it is rather overblown to call the AOSP versions broken or buggy.
AOSP remains the base platform for the hardware ecosystem to develop their
reference designs, AOSP has to work and does work well.

The hardware domain is a big problem for rolling your own OS from scratch, the
associated software stack to support a given piece of hardware is non-trivial.
Even generic Linux is now being supplanted by Android variants in the embedded
space especially if you’re interested in graphics or multimedia.

However, also consider that the most successful player in the Android space,
Samsung, have pursued a strategy of lightly forking Android with their own
features and customizations without breaking compatibility deliberately.

------
ryen
Has Microsoft, Nokia, etc considered some kind of app api bridge or outright
code converter tool for Android/Java apps into their own native SDKs?

Seems that if a lack of apps is your main problem then easing the time to port
an app to your ecosystem should be a high priority. Sure you'd have to re-
implement some proprietary api features, but they likely already have
equivalents in the Windows phone SDK (location services, in-app purchasing,
etc).

------
mwcampbell
As the developer of a couple of small Android apps, I know that I would rather
post them to a Microsoft or Nokia Android app store than port them to Windows
Phone. Of course, it helps that I specifically avoided using the Google Play
Services APIs, but even if I had used those APIs, it would be easier to make
my apps Google-independent than to port them to a whole other platform with
miniscule market share.

------
fredgrott
the article author does not know what eff they are speaking about: The AOSP
counterparts are buggy, feature deprived, and by at least some accounts,
barely maintained.

If that sentence was true than stuff like the phone app would not work,
obviously it does :)

Author does not realize that AOSP is a snapshot of the full android OS

------
SoapSeller
Didn't Google won the the "Oracle vs Google" case on the ground that APIs
aren't patentable?

What prevent MS(or any other big player) to re-implement GMS?

~~~
scholia
The "Oracle vs Google" case isn't over, it's up for appeal...

------
css771
AOSP is open source, period. Just because Google apps aren't doesn't make the
entire thing closed. The binary blobs and baseband firmware might as well be
on any "open" phone. The issue here is not whether Android phones are open or
not, it's whether phones in general can truly be "open" or not.

------
tmzt
There's a response from Dianne Hackborn (hackbod) of Android.

[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/02/neithe...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/02/neither-microsoft-nokia-nor-anyone-else-should-fork-
android-its-unforkable/?comments=1&post=26199423)

------
mkr-hn
Not having Google Play hasn't limited my Kindle Fire experience so far. All
the important apps are on the Amazon store, and most of the rest are low
quality IAP bait.

------
higherpurpose
So Microsoft should fork Ubuntu Touch then. Problem solved ;)

------
bane
"typed on my Kindle Fire"

------
stefantalpalaru
What do they mean unforkable? Cyanogen Mod[1] has been doing it for years.

[1]: [http://www.cyanogenmod.org/](http://www.cyanogenmod.org/)

~~~
bad_user
Amazon also did it.

------
blahbl4hblahtoo
The guy that ran windows phone is now the head of the entire windows division.
His name is Terry Myerson. I doubt very seriously that he is going to shitcan
windows phone.

~~~
raptormissle
Windows Phone is already shit canned. MS just isn't smart enough to get it.

~~~
theg2
Quick, give us more of your amazing market insight!

~~~
raptormissle
Sure, no problem. Windows Phone will be cancelled in 2015 after MS realizes
it's been a massive failure. They'll also lay off 30,000-40,000 people in
2014. And they'll quietly sell off the device division they bought for 7
Billion dollars and take a massive loss.

~~~
blahbl4hblahtoo
I think that you missed my point. The guys that was in charge of developing
Windows Phone 8 is now the guy in charge of Windows. Windows Phone won't be
canceled, it and Windows will become the same thing...just with form factor
differences. Same thing with XBOX OS. It's Windows. Things that make sense for
the desktop won't be on the XBOX or the Phone...and vice versa. You sound like
you aren't a metro fan...They do need to make sure that the desktop is still a
useful tool...but here's the thing. In 5 years you will be hard pressed to
find a monitor of any size or type that isn't touch enabled.

As to selling off the device division...I don't see that happening either. MS
needed Nokia's supply chain, and delivery systems. They needed to have a
division that knows how to take a device from the drawing board to the shelf
quickly...which Nokia should be able to do now that it doesn't have to make
money. It's weird, but taking a long term view with the device department just
like bing and xbox gives the people in that org some room to move.

I find it crazy how much people dislike one company while another
company...also a legal fiction that exists solely to make money...that company
is ok. They "get" me...or "it". Like Google's PR moves like "solving death"?
Seriously? They sell advertising. Meaning that they sell YOU. I"m under no
illusions about MS prior behavior. I'm also under no illusions that Apple or
Google are somehow different. They aren't.

------
ksherlock
Android is already forked[1].

    
    
      Gingerbread: 20%
      Ice Cream Sandwich: 16%
      Jelly Bean: 60%
      KitKat: 2%
    

1:
[http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html](http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html)

~~~
scholia
Not forked, fragmented.

