[mralbie]

Is anyone honestly surprised by this? Google played into the telecoms' hands, they created the first viable competitor to the iPhone and gave it to the telecoms saying "do whatever you want with this, feel free to modify it any way you want".

Google's vision of a market in which handsets are independent from carriers is absolutely poisonous to the industry's business model. Even though the iPhone is very successful I don't think verizon or sprint are interested at all in a world where they are just a "dumb pipe", they won't allow it.

Google lost this war because of their commitment to openness.

[ergo98]

I'm not quite understanding the "gave it to telecoms" part - The telecoms don't make phones. Companies like Motorola, Samsung, and HTC do.

And while Google "gave" it to them, they've all dumped incredible amounts of engineering hours into Android and their derivatives -- any illusion that they just ran a Ubuntu install on their Galaxy S and that was it is utterly asinine around parts like this.

Seriously, the "giving it away" bit is dumb, and while it sells on the non-technical sites, it is an embarrassment on HN.

[mralbie]

I find your lack of courtesy to be the embarrassment to HN.

I was simply try to the make the point that by pushing an open source OS (as in manufacturers could alter the OS to include anything the carriers insisted) Google blindsided itself. They expected to create something that would change the handset/carrier/customer relationship, instead they just enabled the next generation of the same thing. The Nexus One is evidence of this.

[mralbie]

The point I was trying to make is pretty much this: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=5855