How many ways can you get Android wrong in one article?
<p>One of my regulars pointed me at <a href="http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/04/is-android-evil/">Is Android Evil?</a>, an article by one Andreas Constantinou which purports to be a brave and hardhitting contrarian take on Android.</p>
<p>I read this, and I&#8217;m asking myself &#8220;Wow. How many different ways can one guy be wrong in the same article?&#8221;  Particularly entertaining, and the main reason I&#8217;m bothering to rebut this nonsense, is the part where Mr. Brave Contrarian Guy claims that the success of Android has nothing to do with open source and then lists three &#8220;key factors&#8221; of its success in every one of which open source is critically involved.</p>
<p><span id="more-1969"></span></p>
<p>&#8220;With the unprecedented success of the iPhone and the take-it-or-leave-it terms dictated by Apple to network operators, the carriers have been eagerly looking for cheaper alternatives&#8230;&#8221; Damn straight they have been. And two of the key advantages of an open-source cellphone stack are: (1) avoiding per-unit licensing costs, and (2) you get to leverage the fact that somebody else spends most of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-recurring_engineering">NRE</a>.  One wonders how Brave Contrarian guy thinks these could ever be duplicated by a closed-source OS.</p>
<p>&#8220;Android provides the allure of a unified software platform supporting operator differentiation at a low cost (3 months instead of 12+&#8230;)&#8221; Yes, it does. It&#8217;s not like there&#8217;s any secret about open source cutting time-to-market; embedded-systems vendors for things that aren&#8217;t cellphones have been relying on this as a key part of their business strategies for years now.  One wonders to what else Mr. Brave Contrarian Guy wants us to attribute this time-to-market advantage in the cellphone case.  Are we supposed to think it was left under the telecomms operators&#8217; pillows by the Tooth Fairy?</p>
<p>His third point is mostly repetition.  &#8220;In other words, in an Android handset, most of the OEM budget goes into differentiation; compare that to Symbian where most of the OEM budget goes into baseporting.&#8221; Well, duh. This is somebody-else-paid-most-of-the-NRE again.  Mr. Utterly Oblivious Contrarian somehow fails to notice the central reason that investment could be spread across multiple stakeholders in the first place.  You don&#8217;t get competitors covering each others&#8217; engineering costs unless everybody rationally expects to get more out of the pool than they put in, and that&#8217;s exactly the promise open-source development both makes and delivers on.</p>
<p>Mr. Brave Contrarian Guy then proceeds to list eight control points that he claims make Android &#8220;closed&#8221; even though the SDK is open. All of these miss the central constraint on Google, which is that if participation in Android doesn&#8217;t return more value to its development partners than they&#8217;re investing they can fork the codebase.  His failure to grapple with the implications of this is even funnier since he notices that China Mobile is actually doing it.  </p>
<p>You have to think game theory about the second-order, third-order, and nth-order effects of irrevocable strategic commitment to really get what&#8217;s going on here, something Mr. Brave Contrarian Guy seems unwilling or unable to do. Everybody knows that one of the constraints of the open-source game is that overcontrol leads to forking; because it&#8217;s so, Google&#8217;s business partners can form justified expectations about its behavior that enable them to make billion-dollar bets with much more confidence in the stability of Google&#8217;s behavior than they could have otherwise. These expectations, in turn, <em>create future value for Google</em> in ways I&#8217;ve previously described&#8230;and so on, out through several more layers of strategic minimaxing by both Google and its partners.  The bottom line is that these selfish agents can form a stable cooperative equilibrium that <em>wouldn&#8217;t</em> be stable without the open-source commitment.</p>
<p>Against this background: Wow. So Google has process, partnership-agreement, and trademark constraints that push against any attempt to fragment the platform.  How shocking! How unexpected!  How courageous Andreas Constantinou is to write about them!  I&#8217;d say the real question here is how anybody this dim manages to operate a keyboard, except I don&#8217;t actually think Constantinou is as stupid as he appears.  What he&#8217;s done here is adopt the rhetorical posture of Mr. Brave Contrarian as a way of sexing up a business-case analysis that would otherwise rather boring and obvious.  Well, except for the part he doesn&#8217;t get: those control points <em>create value for the Android OEMs, too</em> by stabilizing the cooperative game that all parties are playing.</p>
<p>His failure to get that would be OK, because the factual material about specific Google control points isn&#8217;t completely useless even without the insight that they&#8217;re game stabilizers, if Constantinou hadn&#8217;t felt he needed to set up his rhetorical ploy with a quite idiotic series of claims about open source being irrelevant.  But Google knows better and so do its partners &#8212; and if they somehow managed to forget that, the China Mobile fork would be there to remind them.</p>
