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Android Update Alliance Already Struggling
adeelarshad82 writes "Earlier this year many Android phone vendors and U.S. wireless carriers made a long-awaited promise, which was to push timely OS updates to all new Android phones. Seven months in and especially with the release of Google Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), PCMag decided to reach out to all those vendors and wireless carriers to see how things were coming along. Brace yourselves Android fans, you're not going to like the responses."
At the time, the pledge was covered as the best thing to happen at the I/O Conference. It served its purpose--it comforted Android fans, served as a response to critics of Android fragmentation, and probably helped Google sell more Android licenses. To answer your question about why anyone would be surprised, it's because Google is still held in a glowing light, at least on tech sites, and people still take them for their word.
Yes it is. That's why it's funny that Google chose to ignore how "widespread" Linux on desktop is and didn't see how fragmentation works out for operating systems.
My favorite part of posting on Slashdot over the years has been getting accused of being other people by angry, anonymous neckbeards. The tally of other people I'm supposed to be at this point must number in the dozens.
To answer your question, I don't care enough about smartphone operating systems to post angry, anonymous messages about them. I do, however, care about the fact that Linux once had a non-trivial chance at gaining desktop marketshare and squandered it. You can't create a stable long-term platform while embracing chaos. It's incompatible.
As for your reference to supercomputers, isn't it funny how not one of the almost 1,000 linux distros can make a desktop that gets even 1/10 of 1% market share ... after all, is the desktop harder than a supercomputing cluster?
After all, if Apple could do it with the "dying" BSD and become the most valuable company in the world ... oh, wait - the BSD license is business-friendly, so there's actually *REAL* money to be made developing products atop it (so the failure of linux on the desktop is, at least in part, due to a bad licensing scheme).