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Finding Fault With the Low, Low Price of Android
bonch writes "Google's accusation of patent abuse toward its competitors has generated many responses, some of which have asked whether Android's free price is anti-competitive. Drawing comparisons to Microsoft's antitrust trial, in which they were accused of giving away Internet Explorer to drive competitors out of the browser market, Thurrott argues that Google's rivals are 'leveling the playing field' through patent fees by removing an artificial price advantage funded by monopoly search revenues. 'One could argue that Google is using its dominance in search advertising to unfairly gain entry into another market by giving that new product, Android, away for free. Does this remind you of any famous antitrust case?'"
Its free. Lets be happy about it.
Oh noes, its ruining my ability to sell stuff. Lets attack their patents to ruin it. Its got nothing to do with Microsoft's antitrust trial - that was something bundled with a sold product - this is something free which Google is using to sell something else (apps for example). Its kinda like how certain open source stuff works.
I assume that the author quoted in the summary refers to Internet Explorer, which was bundled and forced down the user's throats, as you could not even uninstall it or the Operating System would stop working.
How can this be compared to Android, which is just an open source project? CHOICE remains, as far as I know.
Haven't we seen enough of these paid shills over the years to understand their point of view? They get paid money by Microsoft to influence opinion so that Microsoft can sell more stuff. They are corrupted by the money, so it isn't an honest opinion. Therefore, why pay attention?
I suppose some variety from the usual Florian dreck is nice, though.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Isn't this a free-as-in-beer vs. free-as-in-speech argument? I may be way off-beam here but I think Android is open source and IE isn't. So no, this would be nothing like the MS antitrust case.
sustainable living
While Android may be free (if you exclude the price to use the android market) it is still very different from the Internet Explorer case. Internet Explorer is bundled with the Windows operating system, so its installed already whether you like it or not. Android is a choice by the manufacturer and a relatively cheaper choice then the competition. Manufacturers CHOOSE to use Android, and consumers CHOOSE to use Google for their search queries. Nobody is being forced into anything.
Thank you, Slashdot, for informing me of a website I never, ever, want to read again.
Agreed. I'll believe these claims about Android being anti-competitive when those same accusers also declare intention to sue entities like Canonical, who also give away superior software for free on a regular basis.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Is it? I've been trying to find a recent source release for Android .....
I think the best you can say is that Android *was* open source.
This entire proposal rests on the assumption that Google has a monopoly in search. Does it? The latest figures show Google Search has 63.6% of the market. What percentage of the desktop market did Microsoft have in the nineties when it decided to tie Windows and IE together (in violation of its 1994 settlement with the DOJ)? I'm sure it was at least 90%.. Apparently it was news in Dec 1998 when Windows marketshare dropped below 90% "for the first time"...
There's a big difference between Google's 63% and Microsoft's >90%.
In today's world there is only one meaning of the world 'anticompetitive', and it means: didn't pay the politicians enough to be left alone to do business as one sees fit.
So what if somebody is giving away free product? How about a free OS altogether? If they can do this and not go out of business, they should and consumers are the winners, not losers in this game. If the competition can't do anything about it, then it sucks for the competition. If the competition goes out of business because of it, it sucks for them. If eventually the company has to push prices above 0, this will just signal the market that there is a possibility to compete on non-zero price again.
You can't handle the truth.
I don't think the article or summary writer actually know how anti-trust works. IE being free wasn't what caused the anti-trust case, it was the fact it was bundled to a product that was already considered a very strong monopoly in the market.
About the only thing that could make Android an anti-trust case is if advertisers were forced to use an android phone to create and administer their ads on Google's services.
Lets make collecting rain illegal.
It IS, in some western states, illegal to collect rainwater. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/water/4314447
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Paul Thurott is an unabashed shill. Nothing to see here move along
IE6 was the version of IE released after the browser wars. IE 2 was useless - it came on my NT4 CD and crashed on startup on a clean install. IE3 was okay. I had it and Netscape installed, and usually preferred IE3. IE4 was bad, but not quite as bad as Netscape Communicator 4, which was just plain horrible. IE5 was what IE4 should have been, and Netscape was dead at this point. IE6 cleaned up IE5 a bit. And then we had a long wait for Mozilla to get into a useable state.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This could actually make a dangerous precedent. If you give out free (as-in-beer) software, you're accused of dumping? So Flash, Acrobat Reader, anti-virus software, Quicktime, Paint.Net, and the Opera browser are all guilty? I really hope that if someone actually makes such a case, it'd be shot down instantly.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
If Android is anticompetitive, then Bing most certainly is. Microsoft entered online search and advertising for the sole purpose of using its OS monopoly and buckets of cash to deprive others (specifically Google) of revenue. Proof? Losing more than $8Billion over the past 6 years isn't "trying to get a foot-hold". It's dumping. It's bundling. It's taking a dump in the pool so that nobody can swim there anymore.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
This is a shill article because the lie is so fucking obvious to detect. First of all, Android is made by the Open Handset Alliance. Google is of course a very major player in it same as Nokia was a major player in Symbian BUT it is called an alliance for a reason. Google doesn't work on it alone.
Second, and this is the big whopper. Where do you think MS gets the money from to fund WM7? If it had to charge full market price the handsets would cost a fortune because it would have to pay for ALL the losses of all the previous windows mobile versions. The constant rename campaigns alone would set you back a hundred bucks per license.
MS is using its monopoly on the desktop and office software market to fund its other operations, from the original x-box (which was economically a dismall failure) to MS phone software which so far has NOT had the kind of sales to pay for its own development costs.
And Apple? Same deal, no upstart company could have done the iPod whose profits were used to then launch the iPhone and then the iPad. The major advantage Apple always had over smaller players is that thanks to its massive reserves it could place orders so large that it got discounts nobody else gets making their players cheaper by comparison (MB for MB).
So basically Google and a LOT of other players pooled their resources to create a product they could all benefit from and made it available for "free". So? MS used its monopoly resources to create a product nobody else can use for free. Apple used it fast wealth to create a product nobody else can use or even create gadgets for without paying them and they often just refuse to license stuff.
Who is being the bad guy again? Oh of course, Google for being less evil. What people forget about Googles "Don't be evil" slogan is that doesn't say "Be good" it just means don't be as evil as the rest... and in American Business, that is a pretty low standard.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.