Re:”No one at Google is Returning Our Calls”
by tanzam75 on Friday December 27, 2013 @12:12PM
(#6971481)
Isn't Microsoft also more restrictive when it comes to what parts of Windows OEMs are allowed to customize?
It's one thing to swap out PROGMAN.EXE, as HP did with NewWave. But you're not allowed to interfere with the ability to run Windows Update.
Re:”No one at Google is Returning Our Calls”
by tadfisher on Saturday December 28, 2013 @02:56AM
(#6974371)
That's just the bargain Google struck with carriers and OEMs. They have the reins on Google services, but allowing OS customization was a concession to get third parties to adopt Android as the de facto iOS competitor. And OEMs and carriers love to push their own customizations to build revenue streams.
Developing a new shell for Windows was technically possible, but must have seemed like an outlandish prospect to companies like Compaq or Dell. ("Where are we going to hire a bunch of C developers who know GUIs and can do a better job at this than Microsoft? Forget about it.")
Some companies did go there -- for instance, HP had an advanced Windows shell called NewWave [0], but I don't think they ever built PCs specifically for it.
Today, the situation is very different. The executives at any old phone maker will look at Android and say: "That's just Java, isn't it? We have plenty of people who know Java. Hell, there's a school down the road where they train 100 Java developers every year. Let's do it! We can be a software company too, just like Apple!"
And of course we know how that turns out. But it will take a long time until the executives at all those LGs and HTCs will recognize that their organization sucks at software, because it's not a software organization at its core. (Nokia spent tens of billions of dollars on Symbian and MeeGo until they finally got this lesson, and they ended up selling the phones to a software company.)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_NewWave