Apple Should Steer Clear of Google

While Apple seems to take a litigious "throw enough Sh-- at the wall and some will stick" approach to protecting their IP (market share), Google is also making a few BIG mistakes in it's control of the Android "ecosystem", and is perhaps trying to cater to too many interests at once. From a consumer's perspective, it seems that Android would have created an explosion of new products with innovative ways of connecting to the Internet, sharing information between devices, and taking our ideas of mobile communications into a new paradigm. Android is a perfect OS for new convergence technologies - like cameras that sync with websites to directly upload photos, or android tablets that at their core capacity could connect to the internet, play games, and consume video and music content. You could build almost anything with its GPS, Wifi, and other firmware components that could be used selectively to create cool mobile electronics that were not necessarily phones or even handheld electronics. However, Google's CDD guidelines for joining the "Android Ecosystem" require hardware to have among other things - a minimum 2 MPXL rear-facing camera, GPS, and a MAXIMUM screen resolution of something like 800x440 (sorry, you'll have to get special approval for that; i.e. be friends with Google and be ready to sell millions of units). So again it all comes back to the hardware brands, their legal relationships with software providers, who stole what from whom, and at some point the carriers. Kinda sad, because if all software were part of the public domain, perhaps these manufacturers could just focus on building the technology we want and leave us with the freedom to do with it what we wanted - perhaps then we wouldn't have cool media gadgets that don't play Flash or even run multiple apps at once - and then 2010 wouldn't seem so much like 1984...