[azakai]

> And basically quit the handset market

There are non-OHA Android products that are successful: The Kindle and Nook, for example. Those happen to be tablets and not phones, but I don't see a fundamental reason for that.

> Isn't that like saying if Compaq wanted to ship BeOS or dual boot machine, it could forgo getting the OEM incentives that Dell, HP etc. received from Microsoft?

Almost, but not quite.

First, Microsoft was an absolute monopoly in the market. Android isn't, but it is true that the main competitor is Apple which doesn't let you use their OS, so Android's position as a licenseable OS is pretty dominant. You could say that's not Android's fault though.

Second, in the Microsoft case, Compaq could ship BeOS but it would then have to lose all of Windows. With Android, if you ship Aliyun then you can still use core Android, but you do get that code later, and you also lose the ability to use the proprietary stuff like the app store and maps and so forth.

I agree these are not necessarily huge differences, there is still something to be said for Google having a tremendous amount of power here and is using it. But it is not quite as bad as things were with Microsoft.

[josephlord]

Whether Google is an absolute monopoly depends on how you define the market. It isn't a monopoly in the market for consumers to buy mobile phones BUT in the market for manufacturers to license mobile phone OSes it probably does have a monopoly position in the market.

WebOS, Boot to Gecko and even WinMo have fairly small proportion of the market even combined.

[recoiledsnake]

>Second, in the Microsoft case, Compaq could ship BeOS but it would then have to lose all of Windows. With Android, if you ship Aliyun then you can still use core Android, but you do get that code later, and you also lose the ability to use the proprietary stuff like the app store and maps and so forth

Wrong, Compaq would've lost the OEM incentives and discounts which would've put them at a disadvantage versus HP and Dell, but they still would've been able to ship Windows.