Competitors Complain To EC That Free Android Is a 'Trojan Horse' 315
First time accepted submitter DW100 writes "Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle have taken it upon themselves to moan to the European Commission about Google's Android dominance, which they say is an underhand bid to control the entire mobile market. The firms are part of the FairSearch group, which has just filed a complaint that Google is using Android as a 'Trojan Horse' to take control of the mobile market and all the related advertising revenue. Microsoft would of course know all about this, being at the end of several similar anti-competitive complaints in the past."
Re:Give it away for free to break the competition. (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft did practically give away their OS for free. Major PC vendors got to install it on their products for only a few dollars per copy--a low enough cost that there was no advantage looking for other competitors to get a better deal.
Re:News Flash! (Score:5, Interesting)
As a device manufacturer, if you want to use Google Play on your device, you have to use other Google services as well.
If you want to use Android without Google services, you can. But you won't get to use Play either.
Google isn't using Android as a crutch, it's using Play.
Re:Give it away for free to break the competition. (Score:4, Interesting)
If Microsoft had given away Windows for free, and included the source, and put it all under a license which made it possible to create your own derivative without being beholden to Microsoft in any way... the most likely outcome would have been the replacement of wine [winehq.org] and a possible 'Windows shell' on top of X11 or even an alternative graphics environment based on GDI. I don't think those who chose Linux - or any other unix - would deem the Windows kernel to be a suitable replacement. I know I would not have felt this, nor do I still.
I don't think other vendors would have complained like Microsoft and its gang are complaining now. Complaining about Google giving away Android is a bit like complaining about Sinterklaas [wikipedia.org] or Santa Claus [wikipedia.org] or jultomten [wikipedia.org] giving presents to children by claiming this to be a nefarious scheme for the little brats to start believing in gods or the supernatural. Yes, there will be people who make this claim. No, they are generally not taken seriously.
Reverse of the Windows+MSIE combo (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows was the thing people had to have, the non-free monopoly-like thing (I was never fully comfortable calling them a monopoly, but the courts disagreed, so whatever). And they gave away an application, MSIE, hoping people would use it to establish new legacies that required it, so they wouldn't be able to switch to standard browsers and MSIE's underlying OS would continue to be required.
The situation here is inverted. Android is the thing nobody really cares about; people they can take it or leave it, or even fork it and compete with Google if they want. But the applications, primarily Google Maps but also (this makes very little sense to me) Youtube and Google Play (seriously, at least we're going to admit these are relatively minor factors, I hope) are the proprietary stuff that Google is taking a hard line on. Google's applications correspond to Microsoft's 1990s OS, and Google's OS corresponds Microsoft's 1990s application.
The big difference, of course, is that nobody, I mean nobody has Google Maps as a dependency. You can throw every single bit of Android and every single Google application away, and not miss it very much, or at least not to the same degree that people suffered 20 years ago, where Windows APIs were required by a majority of "pop" software so lots of people had something they couldn't use without it. I'm not saying they're bad; most people (me included) think Google Maps is very nice. I'm just saying anyone who has the back-end data can fairly easily [*handwave*] build a map application, and if someone else does that, it's easy for users to switch.
Ask any Android user if they're "locked in" to Android. Most of them will laugh. Maybe there really is some particular app which only has an Android version available, which they depend on every day and can't lose and is creating a network effect. I don't know. But I bet it's not a Google application.
Google has lots of neat things for users, but not one single damn thing that a user needs, either directly or indirectly.
BTW, I actually bought an Android 4 tablet which didn't come with the Google applications. It was no problem at all. So people who say an Android box needs this stuff, are totally full of shit. They're not merely wrong; they're liars. This is a non-story.
Actually, my favorite part of TFA was the first sentence:
Looks like the usual suspects and mostly-nonproductive entities, hardly a "diverse group."
Re:News Flash! (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is terrifying. But this isn't a traditional monopoly, where the owner can suddenly triple the prices or box out the competition. Because Android is open source software, Google benefits tremendously from it but doesn't own it.
Re:Holy Inaccurate Summary, Batman! (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, could that summary be more biased and incorrect? The complaint isn't that Android is an underhanded bid to control the entire mobile market. The complaint is that Android is abusing their (potentially) monopoly position to unfairly position their other products in dominant positions, hindering competition. You know, things like positioning Google Docs in a preferred position on the home screen thereby harming competition with Microsoft Office (as an example).
This is EXACTLY the behaviour that got Microsoft into trouble when they used their dominant market position to push IE on users and hurt competition from other browsers. This is EXACTLY the sort of behaviour that most on Slashdot feel Microsoft was in the wrong for. But, I'm sure most on Slashdot are now going to claim Microsoft is getting their just desserts and its now ok because Google is doing it to them rather than being rightly offended at the actions, regardless of who does it and to whom it is done.
I'm not sure I buy that. My HTC phone has an HTC Sense home screen, even though the word "Googe" is etched across the back of the case.
In fact, I don't think a single widget on my phone's home screen is or ever was unmodified Google code.
I could be missing something, but I was definitely under the impression that the source code for the entire Android system is available for use and abuse (subject to licensing limits like GPL) and that third parties can pretty much adapt it at will. Nor am I aware that Google makes you sign in blood that you will present preferred Google apps over other possible apps before you can build and sell an Android product.
Yes, Android devices tend to like to "keep it in the family" and use other Google apps because they tend to play well together, but unlike Microsoft, Google apps generally don't lock you in to other Google apps, nor are you required by license to include any Google apps if you don't want to.