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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?'"
The analogy is flawed, they can't compare Android to IE. IE was shipped with WinOS. WinOS was the more or less the only used OS out there ( I mean for the general population) , that's why it was anti-competitive to give for free ( or why it was anti-competitive by MS ). Now the case with Android is that it does not enjoy a monopoly, the hardware is diverse, and on the same hardware provider ( Like HTC for example) is offering different OS. If they want to offer it for free then it's not the Open Handset Alliance's problem, if others want to out compete Android, then they must offer something distinguished so that people will consider paying for it. It is the same more or less with Linux on the desktop.
Agreed, but more importantly (IMO), they aren't bundling Android with their "monopoly" produce of search.
Microsoft didn't just give IE away for free... they took their dominant position of OS distribution, and bundled in a free-as-in-beer IE, AND (initially) did not provide any way to remove it. They also provided major "incentives" (read; deterrents) to hardware distributors to encourage them to only ship Windows.
Google is not providing any additional incentives to handset makers who use Android. And many of those (ex. HTC) make just as many handsets that run other OS's, and push/market them equally. When Dell started selling some boxes with linux on them, it was only a couple, and they were underpowered; ditto for their no-os choices; and the price difference was not the equal of the cost of a Windows license.
Google's offering is also free-as-in-freedom, which IE was not. You can argue about v3.0 if you like, but it's not officially in distribution yet, and the source to IE was never free.
Also, when you go to google.com, you don't have to use Andoid, and it's not pushed on you either. A more comparative example - when a mobile user goes to google.com, they can still use the site just as well as if they came from Andoid. When a Netscape user went to Windows Update, it simply did not work - and still does not work - it requires IE.
Can some similarities be drawn? Yes. Fortunately, by doing so, it should be obvious that they are actually making the right decisions with how to distribute this product, as opposed to the many anti-competitive choices that Microsoft made.