Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Competitors Complain To EC That Free Android Is a 'Trojan Horse'

Posted by timothy on from the takes-exactly-one-to-know-exactly-one dept.

First time accepted submitter DW100 writes "Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle have taken it upon themselves to moan to the European Commission about Google's Android dominance, which they say is an underhand bid to control the entire mobile market. The firms are part of the FairSearch group, which has just filed a complaint that Google is using Android as a 'Trojan Horse' to take control of the mobile market and all the related advertising revenue. Microsoft would of course know all about this, being at the end of several similar anti-competitive complaints in the past."

1 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what is stopping them from doing the same thing by djdanlib · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Nobody's exposed to the price of the OS on mobile. The carrier doesn't add an OS fee to the phone and neither does the manufacturer. They don't offer a discount because the OS is free, or the high-end Android phones would be advertised as less expensive because of it. Believe me, advertising would get ahold of that and market the heck out of it because adding the word "free" to your marketing material attracts customers like flies to honey. No, they fix price points the same as their competition and say "sell this at that price point." So it's not about price, it's about the quality of the smartphone apps. Also price fixing that they somehow get away with.

    iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, all those other device owners want to install Google's products (GMail, YouTube, Maps, Now, etc) on their devices where available. When those products aren't available, the actual device users - you know, the people who actually give the money to the carriers - get really cranky and consider jumping ship. And when those products become available, they set new records for number of downloads. Remember when Google Maps became available for iPhone?

    So it's not that there are no alternatives, because there are quite a few. It's that the consumer preference is for Google products.

    Everybody wants a slice of Google's market share, but they want to do it without making products that are better than Google's. I think that is what the EU manufacturers are trying to disguise by calling it a 'trojan horse'... The Trojan horse was an attempt to destroy something from within. Android taking over the market is not necessarily a malicious thing. (I'm sure there are some marketers who want it to be.) It offers apps that people want more than the alternatives. That's what skyrocketed the iPhone into dominance awhile back, and that's what Blackberry won at before that, and it's what WinMo has yet to achieve.

    So you know, I'm not totally a fandroid here. I want products that are better than the Google products. In fact, I would really like Microsoft's Live Maps on my Android. That aerial view beats Google Maps hands down. I would also like various Apple-only live audio processing applications on Android or WinMo, but I can't, because those OSes do not currently have low-latency audio processing like IOS. Just saying, this is my assessment of the situation.