

  (Source: driftingfocus/flickr)



I. Now, Certainly, the Platform is Burning



burning platfrom
a healing stream of cash. [Image Source: Mobus]




II. Rich Assets Unlikely to be Sold for Different Reasons




Android statues
[Image Source: AndroidModo]


III. Did Mr. Elop Start the Fire?



Stephen Elop



Source: Reuters

Comments     Threshold


RE: Two drowning men trying to save each other
By Tony Swash on 5/8/2012 12:35:12 PM , Rating: 2
There is no point in them forking android. why would they do that? How does that benefit them? That would give them their own platform and product differentiation but look at the other players with their own platform (rim and symbian) - they are failing. If Samsung developed their own platform, they would incur all the development and business costs which you have mentioned and those costs are a huge net loss for google. And android is free. Samsung would start making losses instead of profits in the smart phone market if they made their own OS.

On the other hand, it makes sense to make WP phones. The hardware is virtually the same. The only reason it's not exactly the same is for marketing reasons (product differentiation and branding).

Android is free in terms of having no monetary license but it comes with strings - you have to use Google services such as search, maps. Suppose Samsung got a really good monetary offer from another company to use their search and maps and Samsung thought the current version of Android was at a basic level pretty good, then why not fork it and cut the strings binding them to Google. As the only Android handset maker making any money, as the dominant Android handset maker by far, Samsung have got some powerful leverage, how they choose to use that will be interesting to see. I have no idea whether Samsung will do anything like this but I am sure they must be considering their options.

RE: Two drowning men trying to save each other
By zephyrprime on 5/8/2012 12:46:58 PM , Rating: 2
What other search and map provider? Bing? Mapquest? Yahoo? Bing loses 4 billion a year and mapquest and yahoo as also rans. The mapping services at mapquest and yahoo suck and the yahoo search sucks. Bing is the only other decent choice but MS would never tie to it any Linux platform. As soon as Samsung announced that they would go with a proprietary platform, samsung phone sales would drop because no one has any faith in Samsung being able to deliver a decent OS experience (which is why everyone is bailing on BB and Symbian). Any monetary incentive would be tiny compared to how much sales Samsung would lose.

The strings Google ties to Android are free value adds for the phone manufacturers. None of the phone guys have a map service, search service, or document service of their own to offer and creating anything like them would cost a fortune and produce low quality compared to extent google offerings.

