b) Amazon Silk is a game changer that probably has Google fuming. Buying Palm is probably a hedge bet in case Google clamps down. The end-user platform(devise, OS, browser) war between Google, Apple, and MS is to control the user data. Amazon wants to make sure it has an unrestricted piece of that data.
Opera Mini has been doing the remote-rendering thing for years and years now. It is the most widely used mobile browser, with 113+ million users and 2+ billion daily pageviews.
> [Opera] is the most widely used mobile browser
To your point about "fuming", I think you're right. There's no evidence that Google's analytics or search (advertising) products will be negatively impacted by silk.
1: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-eu-monthly-201009-... 2: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-na-monthly-201009-...
If Google were to clamp down on Android, why wouldn't Amazon just continue developing their Android fork? Seems like it would be a lot more effort to get webOS to where they need it to be.
Google already has too many mobile OS's and Amazon's expertise is elsewhere.
I feel like I'm missing some core component of Palm here that makes it valuable to even still be talked about. Had they had some amazing version of Android with a custom browser and all that, I'd understand this a lot more quickly.