beatle

apps empower MILLIONS of users.

"OS-level capabilities" empower a handful of developers/hackers/etc..

The only joke here is Google.

doesn't change the fact that Android is an inferior product.

Driverless cars. Google Glasses.

The CEO's job is to allocate resources to initiatives that will make the company money. NOT to fool around with worthless projects like driver less cars and glasses that are just complete waste of money and resources.

Shouldn't they be spending time and money fixing Android and the Android market place?

>Android was purchased by Google two years prior to the release of iOS

-Steve Jobs started planning the development of the iPhone in 2002.

-Apple's collaboration with Motorola to produce the Rkr E1 started in 2004.

- Official Development of the iPhone started early 2005.

-Google bought Android in Aug 2005

>The physical form of that involvement may have changed, but that doesn't qualify Android as a "knee-jerk reaction".

Android copying the iPhone's user interface, touch screen, form factor, ecosystem, etc. is a knee-jerk reaction to iOS.

Producing the best thing we possibly can for users is our paramount thing. I think we have demonstrated that over a very long period of time with a whole variety of different issues we’ve faced around the world.

Hilarious. Lately, Google's wannabe products/services are knee-jerk reactions to existing products. Google is driven by envy, not by the desire to innovate or create a better product or service.

Android = iOS

Android tablets/ICS = iPad

Motorola Acquisition = iOS

Google+ = Facebook

Google Offers = Groupon

Google Places/Hotpot = Yelp

Chrome = IE/Firefox

Google Docs = MS Office

so on...

Techies love to downplay the value of an MBA because they are insecure. Just because Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison, Page/Brin, etc. created world-class companies they think MBAs are worthless.

MBAs are indeed worthless if you're Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, etc.

BUT YOU'RE NOT.

There are thousands of world-class companies (Fortune 1000, small businesses, start-ups, etc.) that were founded/run by MBAs. the VCs, Investors, etc. who funded your worthless start-ups have MBAs.

Every Arrogant techie should remember this: For every successful start-up, there are 1000's other start-ups that failed because the techie founders did not have the business knowledge or experience to execute, manage and lead their companies.

here's a great comment from the original article:

My take is that Android is an unmitigated disaster for Google. It could go down in history as an historic error as great or greater than IBM's failure to secure the IP of MSDos and the x86 chip, giving away the PC market to Microsoft and Intel.

Look at what happened. Google were sitting pretty in a special relationship with Apple: with Schmidt on the Apple board and Page a friend of SJ and being mentored by him. Google benefitted hugely. Google was the default search engine and Google the default maps

They betrayed SJ, stabbed him in the back "Et tu Brute"? They appear to have used insider knowledge of the iPhone to secretly switch the Android from a Blackberry to iPhone look alike, allegedly stealing IP wholesale from Oracle, Microsoft and of course Apple and created a mortal enemy of SJ who, quite naturally declared nuclear war on these treacherous ......s. But far from benefitting Google shareholders, Android is a money pit sucking the lifeblood out of Google.

Google have invested countless billions in Android, even more billions in buying that other money pit Motorola, have enmeshed themselves in the most humungously expensive global litigation mess imaginable, being sued by three of the richest and most successful companies on the planet. They are facing death by a thousand cuts, with unimaginably large legal fees, damages, licence fees and compensation, to say nothing of destroying Google's reputation as the "Good" "Do No Evil" company, turning it into into the most sordid, hacker, privacy and IP robber of all time and the probability of facing serious anti-trust investigations by the US and EU.

And all for what? 80% of their mobile revenue comes from their mortal enemy Apple, who will leave no stone unturned to stick in and twist the knife and will doubtless use Siri to undermine and exploit Google search and Google maps, hiding the vital user information that Google need, depriving them of the advertising revenue which is their whole raison d'être.

Remember: this is just $1.70 of revenue (NOT PROFITS) per user. It means that Google are running massive losses on every Android device, while Microsoft are earning net profits from the licensing to Android OEMs amounting to more than 5 times as much as Google's revenue. To make matters worse, Amazon have castrated Google's revenue by forking Android cutting off their revenue stream. Samsung and other OEMs may do the same.

But the real sword of Damocles for Android is Apple's world wide legal battle to stop them using Apple IP. This campaign is still at an early stage, given the snails pace of litigation, but is beginning to show signs of real progress. Bit by bit Apple is degrading Android stripping it of the user satisfaction of iOS's look and feel. Perhaps the most significant Apple victory is the recent ruling by Judge Posner upholding the largest part of Apple's touchscreen heuristics ('949) patent in their case against Motorola. Winning this patent case against Motorola could be a turning point, stripping Android of its iPhone gestures, and turning Motorola to stinking, rotting carcase around Google's neck.

What is most amazing about Motorola and to a lesser extent Samsung is that their principle defence case against Apple and Microsoft consists of attempting to abuse essential patents protected by FRAND, which is likely to bring crashing upon their heads (and of Google who have publicly supported their underhand tactics) the wrath of the EU and US anti-trut bodies. Bear in mind that the EU can fine all three companies 3 times their annual turnover for such gross and barefaced violations. Google now have few friends in Europe and the knives are circling. Perhaps it is soon going to be "Et tu Brute" time for Google. Revenge is sweet, as they say!

ANOTHER knee-jerk reaction from Google.

A product or service based on a reaction is driven by envy. not based on passion to innovate or the desire to provide a better service. it's just based on envy. all it cares about is what the other guy is doing.

This has been Google's strategy lately thanks to Larry Page.

Apple Facebook MS Yelp Groupon the list goes on and on...

While Google's chief executive Larry Page recently described an $2.5 billion annual run rate for the company's mobile revenues, the company has testified that it has earned less than $550 million from Android across four years from 2008 to 2011.

wow that's low.

Had over a dozen friends and relatives who went through the same thing. You may be interested in this.

Daily Aspirin May Help Prevent and Treat Cancer

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/health/research/studies-li...

http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20120320/daily-aspirin-may-...

it wouldn't even run on Android phones. from one of the comments.

>i downloaded it 3 times, and it didn't even start at my lg p500 android 2.3.

there is no way this is an accident.

from the article:

As it happens, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier in the day that the Securities Exchange Commission was investigating the high-frequency exchanges -- including BATS -- as part of a broader probe into whether the new trading platforms are using their high-speed links to the major stock exchanges to gain an unfair advantage.

>And how exactly does having a microkernel fix the problem of having a stable driver API? Drivers must be written to some framework.

at this stage i will refer you to, ironically, Andy's book:

http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Operating-Systems-3rd-Edition/d...

If you love your phone set it free. If it comes back to you, it's yours. If it doesn't, it never was.

Here's one for you genius. This would not be such a hard problem to solve on a Hybrid/microkernel OS. And you wonder why some Android devices don't get updates?

The Android kernel code is more than just the few weird drivers that were in the drivers/staging/android subdirectory in the kernel. In order to get a working Android system, you need the new lock type they have created, as well as hooks in the core system for their security model.

In order to write a driver for hardware to work on Android, you need to properly integrate into this new lock, as well as sometimes the bizarre security model. Oh, and then there's the totally-different framebuffer driver infrastructure as well.

This means that any drivers written for Android hardware platforms, can not get merged into the main kernel tree because they have dependencies on code that only lives in Google's kernel tree, causing it to fail to build in the kernel.org tree.

Because of this, Google has now prevented a large chunk of hardware drivers and platform code from ever getting merged into the main kernel tree. Effectively creating a kernel branch that a number of different vendors are now relying on.

Now branches in the Linux kernel source tree are fine and they happen with every distro release. But this is much worse. Because Google doesn't have their code merged into the mainline, these companies creating drivers and platform code are locked out from ever contributing it back to the kernel community. The kernel community has for years been telling these companies to get their code merged, so that they can take advantage of the security fixes, and handle the rapid API churn automatically. And these companies have listened, as is shown by the larger number of companies contributing to the kernel every release.

But now they are stuck. Companies with Android-specific platform and drivers can not contribute upstream, which causes these companies a much larger maintenance and development cycle.

http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/android-kernel-problems.html

For your 2nd question

In Mac OS X, Mach is linked with other kernel components into a single kernel address space. This is primarily for performance; it is much faster to make a direct call between linked components than it is to send messages or do remote procedure calls (RPC) between separate tasks. This modular structure results in a more robust and extensible system than a monolithic kernel would allow, without the performance penalty of a pure microkernel.

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin...

>And they are, the future just hasn't arrived yet. But microkernels see more and more adoption every day. They offer a degree of reliability that is unprecedented. But they also come with a performance penalty that is for a lot of people enough of a drawback that they would rather have 'good enough' than 'perfect'.

Correct. The future of computing is mobile and the weakness of the Linux kernel's monolithic architecture is highlighted by Android's numerous design and implementation issues as well as Android's numerous maintainability, upgrade, reliability and performance problems.

Tanenbaum was actually right.

of course there's value in hiring Linus that's why Steve tried to hire him.

ROFL I remember this.

BSD guys make fun of Linux on message boards and Web sites, the gist being that BSD guys are a lot like Linux guys, except they have kissed girls.

Theo de Raadt is a pioneer of the open source software movement and a huge proponent of free software. But he is no fan of the open source Linux operating system.

"It's terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"

http://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616th...

Linus doesn't have any experience with microkernels and BSD. Jordan Hubbard was a better hire in retrospect.

yeah. and they can always use part of that money to start another company.

they can use part of the $210M to start another company.

I apologize.

Anyway, how about books/song/movie purchases?

Agree. I apologize.

pls. answer the question. it will give us perspective of where you're coming from (why you hate apps).

plenty of room for growth.

let me guess. you're a web developer threatened by the explosion of apps on mobile devices?

>they're free.

but you didn't pirate the apps. my point exactly.

amazing. everyone i know loves draw something. congratulations.