Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Low-lying fruit is essentially the casual reader market.
Which, yes, is the best they can hope for in the near term.
I'm just thinking that casual readers are a non-trivial market, especially since neither Apple nor Google--the current non-Amazon brands mining that market--offer a PC solution.
Rather than leave the field to Amazon, MS first tried to partner with NOOK (who failed them miserably) and now with Ingram.
As I said, it's not for me, but it's an attempt to bring a bit more competition to the ebook world. Who knows, "maybe the horse will sing."
As, for the Oracle ruling, it is a bit more than the SCO linux lawsuits.
Remember that ZDNET coverage is enterprise-focused, while sister site CNET is consumer-focused. So the ZDNET author is coming at it from the point of view of corporate line of business app developers. These developers are very risk-adverse. (The same people who wait for the first service pack before migrating to new versions of Windows.)
So it's not panic: it's a recognition that corporate IT types need certainty and will not stick with a development environment that might expose them to legal claims.
Since the court ruling is about the use of the APIs, not just the implementation of the APIs, it impacts all Android apps, not just the OS itself. Absent Oracle saying they will not sue app developers no IT department is going to risk having to explain to their CEOs why Oracle is suing them over an inhouse app.
The case is headed straight for the SCOTUS but that will take years.
In the meantime new IT app development will have to be leery of Android as a development environment.
It's the nature of the beast: corporate managers don't really trust their IT departments and many see them as a necessary evil. That's why so many outsource to IBM, DELL, HP, etc.
|
Certainly there are issues with large corporate IT departments, but that has nothing to do with why companies outsource to IBM, Dell and HP. Usually, it's the IT departments that do the outsourcing. The biggest reason companies outsource is they think they can save money by doing so. For the most part, it's fool's gold, but they still chase it. Frankly, the real issue is that most corporate managers have so distanced themselves from the day to day work that they don't have a clue how things actually work anymore.
As far as the Oracle verse Google ruling, this is Oracle killing the golden goose. The Supreme Court has been hinting for a while that they want to clean up the mess that is copyright and patents in the US. Allowing people to copyright code was a bad idea from the start and doesn't reflect the way that coding actually happens. I can guarantee that there is code in the various Java API's that is borrowed from earlier coding projects. Most coders build up a library of code that they use going from job to job over the course of their career. It's the only way to code efficiently.