How Android Could Stumble
Source: Roger Kay
As high mobility devices ― smartphones and tablets ― sap energy from personal computers, market participants are looking for another horse to back besides Apple.
So far, only Google’s Android platform has made any progress, and its traction is just in smartphones. No other operating system has yet mounted a credible challenge to iOS.
And yet, Google is strangely silent about Android, failing to indemnify its customers against legal claims and guarantee that all rights have been cleared for Android. In addition, developers are a bit perturbed by the lack of a unified Android code base, but this is a minor problem compared to Android’s legal status.
The ambiguity of Google’s commercial support for Android has led to a bizarro world in which Microsoft ends up licensing Android to customers like Velocity Micro and HTC.
We imagine the conversation, which takes place far from public view, goes something like this:
Microsoft (softly): Ahem. We think our cow broke out of our pasture through a hole in the fence and she might be over here. (louder) Oh! There she is, grazing in your backyard!
Ambitious Hardware OEM With Android Aspirations: Huh? I thought it was Google’s cow, and they said anybody who feeds her can take milk. She just wandered in here. By the way, she does give great milk.
Microsoft: You can have the cow, but you have to pay us.
AHOWAA: Whaaah?
Microsoft: Or we’ll be happy to see you in court.
AHOWAA (aside): Let’s see. What’s my relationship with Microsoft? Barnes & Noble, none worth saving. HTC, quite a bit. Velocity Micro, pretty much a requirement.
AHOWAA (out loud): How much for Google’s cow?
Microsoft: Undisclosed terms, the disclosure of which will cause one of the hands to come over here with a flamethrower and lay waste to these lovely rolling hills. (looks around, admiringly)
AHOWAA: We’ll take it!
But while Microsoft provides covering fire, the coup de grace may come from another quarter. This past Friday, Apple won a preliminary judgment against HTC for infringement by Android of patents related to intellectual property in iOS. The developer community is terrified.
Although that fear may be exaggerated, this scenario does suggest that the next phase of the battle between the major players is going to be legal in nature rather than innovative or customer-focused.
When behemoths find each other infringing on one another’s overly broad patents, they tend to settle and set up a nice cozy oligopoly with a bit of faux competition thrown in for decoration. Competition always evolves into the establishment of borders; to wit: cars, movies, and music.
The players are carving up the map now because, once everything stabilizes, not much will change hands. Little guys will be reduced to city-states. Someday, somebody may slap some sense into Congress, and serious patent reform may finally happen, but, until that day, the big guys will derive huge value from the patent system’s utter state of dysfunction.
Google may suffer from not having as large a portfolio of overly broad patents as Microsoft and Apple, but the company has a lot of cash to sustain its efforts.
Intellectual property wars have been intensifying for a while as rival companies try to stake out valuable territory, and if you observe who’s not suing whom, you learn that companies with big patent portfolios tend not to fight each other (e.g., Microsoft and Apple).
Does the future hold a lawsuit between Microsoft and Google?
Microsoft is building a good case that it does have rights in Android through these de facto agreements. A business partner’s willingness to pay Microsoft for access to intellectual property represents an opinion beyond Microsoft’s own. The wisdom through now has been that Android is a viable, open, free alternative to iOS.
If Android stumbles, the field of Apple competitors reopens, and Hewlett-Packard’s webOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 for tablets get a clearer shot. If Google ends up having to charge its customers for Android and pay royalties to Microsoft, then Microsoft increases an already nice stream of revenue from Android. The move also has the effect to raising Android devices’ bill of materials, making Microsoft’s (and other’s) devices more cost competitive.
While annoying, the fragmentation issue is a bit of a red herring. Despite potential legal issues, if Android wins in sheer number of handsets, developers will just suck it up the way they always do.
As a developer friend of mine said, “We code in 18 different languages; we can handle five different OSes for the same stupid handset if we have to.”
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