

The Other Side Of Open - safeerm
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/21/open-wound/

======
divy
Am I wrong in thinking that a company making a closed ("walled garden") system
from an open system is fairly derivative and an expected result? Seems like a
massive oversight in the articles reasoning.

------
ChuckMcM
tl;dr version : Gee Google must be pissed at Amazon for using Android.

See? In the short version it doesn't make a whole lot of sense either :-). It
seems to be part of proprietary lore that an example of someone (not you)
taking technology you developed and running with it is failure. In the open
source world that is defined as success.

So lets imagine for a moment that Google wakes up and decides to build their
own e-reader (sort of along the lines they decided to make phones), what
chance do you think Amazon has of suing them for 'patent infringement' do you
think there is? Kind of hard to sue Google for copying (design details not
withstanding) the Kindle if the Kindle is based on Android is it not?

Or to put it another way, lets say you had this nifty operating system that
you could use for a variety of purposes. Now what would it cost to make an
entirely new product with it, design a user experience, and release it to
customers? Lets just say a lot. And if the customers thought your ideas were
stupid and didn't buy it how would you feel? Like you wasted a bunch of money
right? What if the person who did that wasn't you, spent their own money, and
gave you a valuable data point about what customers want or don't want?

The field is littered with Android 'failures' (the Playbook, and Xoom come to
mind) but what they represent to Google who doesn't need the revenue from
Android is free research and development without any capital risk. I know for
a fact that Google could, should they choose to, staff up and build a
'company' within their company to build any consumer device they chose, from
phone to e-reader to television set. But why do that if RIM is willing to
invest half a billion dollars testing the market with your stuff?

The openness of Android is allowing literally dozens of design ideas to be
tried out simultaneously, how many variations on products can a closed OS
vendor try out? One or two?

------
cmcewen
The default search engine on the Kindle Fire is Google. More people using the
Kindle Fire to search means more advertising revenue for Google.

In addition, the real threat to Google in the tablet/smartphone space is
Apple. More people using Android, even a derivative, results in fewer people
locked in to iOS.

