I guess as Larry Ellison says in the article, they’ll either be geniuses or idiots.

At the end of the day, it’s a consumer device (the smart phone) so it’ll come down to utility and cost. OpenSystems have traditionally won on cost, but lost on utility. Vertically integrated technologies have usually had good end to end utility, but have lost on cost. The real question is whether component costs are now cheap enough,and standard enough where assembly is easy enough to make the end user experience as good as if you controlled the entire stack.

For years, tech companies have attempted to use OS/software differentiation as a competitive advantage. Nothing to do with stability or superior user experience as confidently claim.

In fact, I bet if the Internet had started out primarily in corporations rather than government and academic labs, we’d probably have dozens of competing Internet protocols and standards today.

Just as MSFT’s control of the desktop gave them good margins while squeezing PC vendors, we are going to see a replay in the handset market with Google laughing all the way to the bank. Will Apple will replay their role too?

There was plenty to like about it but usability wasn’t even close to the iPhone 3Gs. I saw plenty of lag on the UI. Lots of odd little bugs like having Google stop responding to requests while the keyboard was open. I couldn’t position the cursor easily without the hardware D-pad on the keyboard. No correction on the hardware keyboard is a huge problem. There was a lot more that needs work too.

But the biggest problem is with the Android Marketplace. I didn’t find any software that worked correctly with the Droid’s larger/higher resolution screen. This strikes me as a huge problem. Android is failing as a platform. When the hottest new phone on the supposed platform isn’t compatible with a lot of the existing software you are going to have trouble competing with Apple’s dominant position as a standard platform. Just a simple app to measure download/upload speeds didn’t work correctly. Now I know you blame the developer for this but users aren’t going to care whose fault it is, just the software has major issues.

Google needs to take a much more proactive approach to hardware/software compatibility or they are going to end up with a large number of devices all incompatible with each other. At that point, they’ve won the numbers game but have lost the platform to competing vendors. Windows works because Microsoft has hardware standards that licensees follow. There is still a huge variety of hardware solutions but in general, Windows works the same on all of those variations. It doesn’t look like Google/Android cares about that kind of compatibility. If they don’t start caring, they will lose to Apple’s huge infrastructure advantage. Apple has the iTunes App store, the standard dock connector and hardware that stay compatible across three different generations. Google needs to follow suit to stay competitive in my opinion.

Atleast that’s still what I read into a lot of net-neu.