The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
Summary: Google and Intel have entered into a strategic alliance to get all future versions of Android running on Intel hardware. Who are the big winners and losers of this deal?
While Microsoft was busy showing off its new Windows 8 tablet features yesterday, Google and Intel were talking up a new partnership that puts Android on the latter's chipsets. Android's Andy Rubin appeared at the Intel Developers Conference to explain how happy the deal made Google. The real winner of the deal was Intel, as the company has been vainly trying to get some credible foothold in the mobile space prior to this deal.
Besides Intel, other winners of the deal with Google are OEMs already fluently speaking Intel yet not already on the Android team. There must be some out there but I can't put my finger on which companies that might be. All of the big players in the mobile space are already churning out Android phones and/or tablets on ARM-based chipsets. There must be some companies out there that were waiting for Android to support x86.
Straddling the winner/loser fence is Google itself, as it now has a pretty monumental task to fork its increasingly complex Android development task to include Intel's x86 architecture. It is already discovering how hard it is to work with just the ARM platform, as the number of Android versions in the market indicates. It recently admitted that the next big thing in Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, while originally planned to be a major update that brings smartphones and tablets onto one version, would instead be a minor update. The version after that, thought to be Jelly Bean, will adopt the role of device consolidation.
Now Google has to do all of this Android updating/developing/consolidating for both the ARM and x86 platforms going forward. While it's certainly a winner picking up an entire hardware platform to expand into, Google may find that its Android effort is stretched to the limit with two totally different sets of code to grow. It may be a winner and a loser with this Intel deal.
The biggest potential winner with this Android partnership is none other than Apple. Its current business plan of suing companies using Android one at a time, and in one country at a time, just got a potential new set of companies to go after. Apple may need to hire a second legal team for the Intel side of things.
Related:
- Microsoft to developers: Metro is your future
- Microsoft’s Windows 8: Here’s what we now know (and don’t)
- Windows 8 unveiled
- Where am I working right now? Thanks to mobile tech you cannot tell
- My dream tablet will likely have a Windows sticker on it
- Intel promises Ultrabooks will become Tablet PCs
- The frustrating experience that is Android Honeycomb on tablets
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Talkback
the biggest loser is
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
How do you get that?
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
no more sweet heart deals for M$.
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
How will they be losing anything?
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
Seriously Linux Geek, get off of the whole "everyone is against Google/ open source" thing...
I don't know
I do not think this is such a big deal. Of course the bloggers here have to twist every news message as an clear sign of the fast doom of Andriod. I suppose that is their job, the thing they are payed for. We probably best ignore this. Together with the strange hypothesis that it would be somehow a win for Apple when more device makers would making competing Android based products.
But I do not think the "wintel" monopoly is still functioning. Both parties have for some time already done "unfriendly" things to each other. Intel working with Linux (even for internal systems for designing chips), Microsoft porting to other processors. And on a property system, no freedom, they decide alone on what it runs.
This is more a logical step taking into account the real market situation, not the FUD, and the need of Intel to do better in the mobile market.
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
It has nothing to do with national boundaries, It has nothing to do with race and religion, In the name of life, liberty and respect. pray.
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RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
seriously please stop the fanboyism, what i see is hordes of fanboys, usually immature, flaming each other.
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
Game developers using the Android NDK
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
Apple's Mobile tech is going to have to compete with inlet's Mobile tech! This was a shot right at Apple to get on board because Intel doesn't want a back seat to Arm! Oh and Intel's mobile tech is more mature and has a higher performance.
Maybe but I doubt it matters to Apple
Pagan jim
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
I admit to not knowing all the specifics.
Pagan jim
Apple?
RE: The winners and losers of the Android/Intel deal
So?
Hasn't "yet". Possibly because no Android tablet maker has made enough to justify the legal expenses. You don't think this will change?
Besides, what has Apple actually won? A bunch of legal expenses and bad PR for it's efforts and somehow it's the potential big winner by doing more of the same? That's a big stretch IMHO.