Remember the nonsense from CyanogenMod CEO McMaster we talked about a few days ago? It turns out the motivation for the baseless comments from McMaster may not exactly be his own. As always, follow the money.
People familiar with the matter say Microsoft is putting money into Cyanogen, which is building a version of the Android mobile-operating system outside of Google’s auspices.
Microsoft would be a minority investor in a roughly $70 million round of equity financing that values Cyanogen in the high hundreds of millions, one of the people said. The person said the financing round could grow with other strategic investors that have expressed interest in Cyanogen because they’re also eager to diminish Google’s control over Android. The identity of the other potential investors couldn’t be learned.
Oh right.
Is this the embrace and extend strategy again from MS?
But imagine MS Android vs Google Android?
It won’t get that far. MS is trying to disrupt the android system by embracing an existing player with diametrically opposed intentions from Google (The enemy of my enemy is my friend).
In the end, they’re hoping the disruption will produce an opportunity for Windows, and if it doesn’t, they still make enough money on the patent deals that they’re in a win-win situation.
Expect further departure from Cyanogen from AOSP.
Never mind that MS already have a few Android phones out there under the Nokia brand…
They’ve been killed off.
Weird disruption. A CEO who uses ios (ipad) for work, gets paid by microsoft and claims to be building a better android. Abomination I say! just fork it and get cyanogenmod away from these people.
One might even get security updates. (*ducks*)
And if they didn’t, I wonder if Google would release the exploit after 90 days
Would be funny if Google ‘retaliated’ with a multimillion pound investment in ReactOS, a team of great engineers, and a team of even greater (and inventive) IP lawyers
in my ‘big companies are very silly’ world..
fingers x’d.
Brings me back to my pondering about RH and Oracle since Oracle went and forked RHEL.
Though I’ve never seen Oracle’s version in the wild. What I see is CentOS where a free option is desired; otherwise RHEL itself..
Wait, now doing what Cyanogen is doing makes them… ROGUE?
cyanogenmod: googles not nice enough for us, lets get in bed with someone even worse.
Hmmm… And what exactly makes them worse?
In the end, they are all the same. And judging from the recent news, I’d even go as far as to say they are even getting a little better… 😉
Google’s entire business model is they sell their users to advertisers, and they seek a monopoly on online advertising, by buying or undermining their competition (online advertisers, or anyone who might carve out an ad segment – creating Google+ to undermine Facebook, Gmail to undermine hotmail/yahoo mail, buying Android to counter iPhone which threatens internet based profit models in general by deemphasizing , etc.). Microsoft makes and sells software, and has been a monopolist. Most public corporation seek a monopoly. It’s built into the system. Both companies unethically and illegally suppress workers’ wages.
I’m not sure why MS is more evil than Google – they are older, been around longer. They also like to get paid for the software they make – is that it?
Really? I had not heard of this. Have you any proof?
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Microsoft-Salaries-E1651.htm
I agree, Microsoft is not the same company that it was in the 90’s. But, it’s hard to ignore history. Microsoft has engaged in some SERIOUSLY shady activity in its past, and there’s no reason to think they are above it now.
Google on the other hand is a fierce competitor, and as far as I know hasn’t done anything too terribly shady to leverage it’s monopoly in online-advertising. (If you can even call it a monopoly. Just because you are by far the industry leader does not make you a monopoly.)
The examples you cite: Google+, GMail, and Android (which they did not buy… they developed it themselves and released as OSS.) are all the proper response in my book. If you feel like you are being challenged by disruptive technology, you don’t go out and try to squash it with dirty business tactics. You try to make a better product and take the market by getting consumers to buy-in to your products on merit. Sometimes it works (GMail, Android) and sometimes it doesn’t (Google+).
That doesn’t mean that I trust Google implicitly, or that they are incapable of scumball tactics. But it makes it a little less likely than with Microsoft.
Edited 2015-01-30 17:25 UTC
Depending on how you look at who’s the buyer and who’s the seller, Google could be considered as chasing monopsony (single buyer) rather than monopoly (single seller).
Yes, actually, Google did buy Android.
Andy Rubin’s company Danger, Inc started development on Android, spun it off as Android, Inc, and then were bought out by Google.
Android was running on real hardware “long” (in technical time, not wall-clock time) before Google ever touched it.
I stand corrected. You learn something new every day…
You haven’t heard? Big DOJ investigation and all that: http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing-…
Or destroy the competition by undermining them with free product offerings that do the same things your competitors charge for. It’s competition, not a tea party. I know competition is supposed to be all that’s good in the world in the modern corporate religion, but that’s not how it works in real life. In real life it’s more like an octagon – few winners, and many battered and bloodied losers.
I went from a 1MB hotmail without spamfilters to 1000MB gmail with the best spamfilters. I went from wanting an iphone like device but without Apple’s restrictions to a HTC Desire with Android 2.2.
Microsoft on the other hand gives me a good enough to not switch OS and a nice default controller for pcs. On the other hand MS hates me. Google tries to appease me and sometimes they succeed.
Edited 2015-01-31 20:09 UTC
The net result: Cyanogen is tainted (both the Microsoft investment and all the other shit happening after it became a corporation), users and developers leave for other custom Android ROMs
Extremely extremely ANGRY.
But we will have to see what happens.
Hopefully the Cyanogenmod CEO understands who they are dealing with, and remember what a grass roots effort to destroy Daryl McBride did to SCO.
SCO also received money from Microsoft under the table as “investment” money.
I would advise the Cyanogenmod CEO to take as much money as Microsoft can give Cyanogenmod and its community.
Nothing wrong with that.
But if ONE LINE of source code is missing, or a public build of Cyanogenmod somehow becomes impossible to build.
Cyanogenmod will suffer the same fate as SCO.
Nothing would PISS OFF the Penguin horde more than removing source code, or attempting to hide it.
Source code is central to what LINUX is. You F* with that you are going to be living in the same box as Mr. Daryl McBride is currently living in Mr. CEO Kirt McMaster.
Welcome to the future, MS Android with Windows Store, Outlook, Bing, Cortana, Bing Maps, One Drive and MS Office.
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They probably just want Cyanogen to have a offering that comes with MS services.
Edited 2015-01-30 18:35 UTC