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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

This really isn't good news for the Android OS. I guess we have Zune vs Plays-For-Sure part 3.

Not if they use android like everyone else. In the case you mention, microsoft created an entirely new stack which it didn't license to other parties, and also deprecated the software its vendor ecosystem was using. Hardly the case here, even though the google move may be slightly antagonistic to its partner vendors and telcos.

It is still really hard to go up against the company doing the development of an OS. It just seems like one of those red flags that should be looked at. At the very least, Google's own phone will probably have all the updated software in a more timely manner then outside vendors.

If Google's going to do this right, then they'll Open Source all the nifty stuff they put into this phone!

Strategically speaking, for Google to win, the Google Phone doesn't have to win. Android has to win. If the Google Phone only reaches the digerati and hipsters, but then heavily influences the rest of the Android market by pushing innovative things forward, then Google wins.

I don't think there is going to be a lot of nifty stuff in the phone (if Google is in fact doing this). From Googles perspective, I think they want a phone that delivers the full Android experience without custom OEM 'user experience additions' and carrier application cruft (I'm looking at you T-Mobile).

I would be surprised if you see anything non-standard on a Google phone.

Yes, but they'll also have the opportunity to put in innovative things that the carriers might not think of.

I don't really follow Android too closely, why couldn't they just put that those in the upstream Android distribution rather than just the version for their phone?

The most likely thing is that they'll do that, but that carriers will leave things out.

microsoft created an entirely new stack which it didn't license to other parties, and also deprecated the software its vendor ecosystem was using.

Didn't Microsoft do something similar with MFC? They tell everyone that MFC is the future, and so my last company builds our development environment on top of it. Then we start finding significant bugs in MFC. We later discover that Microsoft is moving on from MFC and using something else.

The more things change...

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