Million said:
is open source googles strategy indefinetly ? maybe they could do an "ms" as soon as they obtained enough marketshare. |
Google knows that the only way to beat MS (at least in the mobile phone and netbook market) is to use a strategy that MS cannot: giving the OS away for free and making it compatible with existing Linux/Java apps (also free) so it is usable on day one.
Once they do have a market though, their plan is to transition much of the services you use on the desktop (e-mail, office, etc.) into the "Cloud". We have begun seeing this with Gmail and Google Docs, but if they had control over the OS then more integration would be possible. That is the "evil" part of the service - the online parts will not be open and will not be compatible with other applications. Their revenue model is i) advertising on the service itself, ii) subscriptions for professional users (but never for all users) and iii) support contracts for large businesses.
As I said, in order to make people adopt it and so Google don't have to write most of the OS themselves, the OS part will always be open-source. The services and applications will not be, and in that respect they will be worse than MS since you won't be able to save your files to your computer's harddrive.
