One which points to a bleak future in which all work is done by employees of a few monopolistic corporations that defend themselves against competition by giving "good enough" clones of their competitors products away for free.
It seems like an effective strategy for defeating competiton and stifling disruptive innovation.
I sincerely hope it fails.
The thesis of the article is that Android and Chrome are already profitable businesses thanks to increased search revenue, not merely strategic projects. So they're exactly the opposite of spoiler moves that are trying to undercut a competitor's business. Of course it's easy enough to find examples of the latter in the tech world.
I don't quite get how does this apply to Google. Who exactly is that competition and how do they threaten Google?
To me it seems like they're defending against Microsoft-like tactics when someone owns a part of the path between Google and its users (the browser, OS) and tries to leverage that to harm Google's business. I don't see how what Google does stifles innovation.
Exactly the strategy that Microsoft used to destroy Netscape.
It stifles innovation because they don't need to do the hard work to advance the state of the art. They just need to copy the work that's already been done and let the free price and privileged advertising position do the rest.
It's good for Google, but bad for the rest of us. You can say 'but don't users benefit from getting stuff for free?'. Well yes in a way, but we all lose because of the stagnation it causes.
Again, pretty similar to what Microsoft has done in the past. It may be very hard for corporations that have a quasi-monopoly to avoid falling into this pattern in general.
IBM -> MS -> Google -> Facebook -> ?