Quote:
Originally Posted by RockdaMan
No one has ever successfully licensed a platform *and* competed with licensees at the same time. Apple tried it (twice) as did Palm & Nokia
@gartenberg
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I suppose it depends on your definition of "platform"... but JVC licensed VHS technology *and* competed with licensees. I think that this is pretty comparable to what Google is trying to do, particularly as Android is (more or less) an open standard. As was VHS; Palm and Apple were not.
Note, too, that when Palm and Apple were both hardware companies whose products were successful because of their OSes. People wanted a Palm Pilot because of the OS in the same way that people wanted a mac for *its* OS (the mac clones were in Apple's pre-industrial design days). When other companies could get the same software on other hardware, Apple and Palm could no longer charge a premium for their hardware. This danger doesn't really apply to Google, nor did it apply to JVC.
Having said that, hardware is different from software, and Google is undertaking a risky project.