The Other Side Of Open

Am I wrong in thinking that a company making a closed ("walled garden") system from an open system is fairly derivative and an expected result? Seems like a massive oversight in the articles reasoning.

tl;dr version : Gee Google must be pissed at Amazon for using Android.

See? In the short version it doesn't make a whole lot of sense either :-). It seems to be part of proprietary lore that an example of someone (not you) taking technology you developed and running with it is failure. In the open source world that is defined as success.

So lets imagine for a moment that Google wakes up and decides to build their own e-reader (sort of along the lines they decided to make phones), what chance do you think Amazon has of suing them for 'patent infringement' do you think there is? Kind of hard to sue Google for copying (design details not withstanding) the Kindle if the Kindle is based on Android is it not?

Or to put it another way, lets say you had this nifty operating system that you could use for a variety of purposes. Now what would it cost to make an entirely new product with it, design a user experience, and release it to customers? Lets just say a lot. And if the customers thought your ideas were stupid and didn't buy it how would you feel? Like you wasted a bunch of money right? What if the person who did that wasn't you, spent their own money, and gave you a valuable data point about what customers want or don't want?

The field is littered with Android 'failures' (the Playbook, and Xoom come to mind) but what they represent to Google who doesn't need the revenue from Android is free research and development without any capital risk. I know for a fact that Google could, should they choose to, staff up and build a 'company' within their company to build any consumer device they chose, from phone to e-reader to television set. But why do that if RIM is willing to invest half a billion dollars testing the market with your stuff?

The openness of Android is allowing literally dozens of design ideas to be tried out simultaneously, how many variations on products can a closed OS vendor try out? One or two?

The default search engine on the Kindle Fire is Google. More people using the Kindle Fire to search means more advertising revenue for Google.

In addition, the real threat to Google in the tablet/smartphone space is Apple. More people using Android, even a derivative, results in fewer people locked in to iOS.