Earlier this week, Andy Rubin, the original developer of Android and the man in charge of the Android division at Google since Google purchased Android from him, announced he is stepping down from his position. Replacing him is Sundar Pichai, the head of Chrome development. Rubin is still expected to remain at Google to work on other projects. Many take this as a sign that Google plans to eventually merge Chrome OS and Android OS.
While Google have stated that they are comfortable with having two competing products on similar platforms, ultimately, most industry experts view it as a necessary move to have one product to avoid fragmentation, like that which occurred with Android 2 for phones and Android 3 for tablets. Having Chrome OS on low power notebooks and Android on powerful phones and tablets would be performing the same fragmentation that plagued Android in its early incarnations.
A potential merger could signal Google's refocusing on web search, and a plan to center all their products more heavily around web search and advertising. As of now, Android likely makes Google very little money in comparison to their web search revenue, but Android is popular due to a large development community and manufacturer backing. Chrome OS, on the other hand, is much more conducive to web search than Android, but lacks the necessary third-party development to allow it to become popular with consumers. Merging the two could bring the best of both worlds together—a web search conducive OS that have a large following and development community—or it could result in a product with the worst of both worlds—a primitive, clunky OS with little development and third-party support.
As for next week's topic, I know a little bit about cloud computing, like the basic idea behind it, EC2, and Hadoop, but not sure how it fits into an enterprise environment.
Links:
Tech Radar - Andy Rubin Steps Down
Techland - The Coming Merger
No comments:
Post a Comment