I would guess they have 95% of the 3D mobile games market now.
And I didn't say they have additional responsibilities to the market at all. I was just making the case that to limit choice of your partners (and, therefore, your consumers) to kill your competitors is evil. It is what Microsoft did with OEMs and it is what Apple is doing with developers.
Is is perfectly possible to kill a competitor without being evil. The best example is Facebook. I don't think Facebook would ban a developer for using a Google API or a compatibility layer that make games work in Myspace too. They even allow multiple payment platforms!
What I mean is that it is much more than "you may only use Objective C to develop on this device". You also haven't thought this through. It has many more long term implications than the language choice.
And we have a disagreement about what viable mobile platform means.
There isn't much of a mobile games market outside the iPhone. Unless you want to develop children games for the DS. And then you would need to wear a suit to sign a contract with Nintendo. And guess what, they don't sign more than X contracts a year, where X is a very low number. So you could be out of luck.
The point is that if the iPhone is the most lucrative platform now, it is not in the best interest of the developer to put their eggs in only one basket. And markets change. So they should create demand in parallel in other devices too.
But to port to other devices takes time and money, two scarce resources, as you now.
One way they could be less dependent on the iPhone with minimum investment is to use a compatibility layer like Unity. Unity already works on the Wii, and will work on the Android and Xbox soon, with windows phone probably not far away. But with the new rules, that is not a solution anymore.
Also, it is ironic that Unity will work on Xbox but not on the iPhone. Don't you think?
"I will use my operating system monopoly to put you out of business if you don't assist me in putting an unrelated competitor of ours out of business" is worse to you than "you may only use Objective C to develop on this device"?
What about this: "I will use my mobile operating system prestige to put your mobile company out of business if you don't assist me in putting a competitor of ours, Adobe, out of the mobile app business".
The word "monopoly" doesn't add much. People could develop for MacOS back then when Microsoft did that, but nobody used MacOS. Likewise, people can develop for Android now, but nobody uses android.
EDIT: whoa! I have been downvotted after asking if it is safe for children.
So, here are some references.
"Children have much thinner skull bones and their brains have a lot more fluid, so their brain tissues would likely absorb twice more radiation compared to an adult’s brain. But cellphone radiation standards set by the government remains the same for both groups."
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/radiation/
"If the notebook is sitting on a child’s lap, that child is exposed to radio emissions comparable to that of a mobile phone. If the notebook is 20 cm away, the child is subjected to exposure of just 1% to that of a mobile phone"
http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:%20/2007/04/29/warning-keep...
People don't need to type the url. Wikipedia is already installed as a search engine on Firefox's search box (and maybe in IE?). Eventually users will learn to use it.
Crome's omnibox search also takes users to wikipedia without visiting google. They could show ads in the omnibox, but the space and user experience is more limited.
And don't forget that most sites don't get all their referrers from Google, so users are getting there via another way. Some of those are indeed direct traffic, without an intermediary.
Wikimedia is not only a non-profit, but also Google's more sucessful competitor in organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful, albeit with some factual errors and unsourced statements.
Google benefits from Wikipedia articles in that they make Google more useful, but if Wikipedia is always the first result, people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia to get information, just like they go directly to Facebook or to Twitter, even though Google also benefits from their public information.
"We've heard from lots of developers over the past two years who are excited to build on top of Kindle"
So, why didn't they do nothing for two years?
One week before Apple supposedly will announce the iTablet, Amazon creates a press release saying a limited beta of the Kindle SDK will start next month!
If you are the market leader, why would you wait two years for yours competitors? Doesn't make sense to me.
"...Google looked... the way they were being sold (exclusive to specific carriers, and used to lock consumers in, just like all prior phones) and felt that it just wasn't doing the job the way they'd planned. Android had a reason for existing, and it was to break the logjam in the mobile industry".
If that was their intention, they failed at it. The Nexus One costs about the same as the iPhone to produce, yet the unlocked version is sold by the the same price that what an unlocked iPhone would be. That means their are getting Apple like obscene margins.
No non-technical user in his sane mind would pay $330 more for an unlocked phone.
What they must do, if it is not obvious enough, is to get Amazon like margins and monetize the rest with a wave of new consumers hungry to look at ads.
"Americans let the Patriot Act be passed into law, not Google. Stop blaming Google and start blaming your democratically elected government"
Just like Google is putting their lobbyists where their interests are in cases where government intervention (or lack of it) is hurting their business (net neutrality, open mobile applications, visas, wireless spectrum, etc), they should also fight against the Patriot Act.
If people don't feel comfortable using Google's products due to fear of government spying, they will restrict their search, clean their cookies, block adsense/analytics, etc, all of which will impact Google financially.
..until a big company acquires this new startup and kills their product again.
This is one more problem with the cloud computing era.
In the 90's, you could continue to use a product even after it was discontinued. I remember reading that Steve Wozniack is still an Eudora mail user. The last time I heard about Eudora was maybe 15 years ago. You can't say the same about the last startup product.
It can be irrelevant after 8 years, but could be relevant for someone that could act on it at the moment it was captured. Maybe for some social engineering attack.
I see several YC startups in Google's collision path and for some time I have wondered if the advice of not competing with Google in things they are good at is valid.
My opinion is that it never was valid: most startups at the list bellow were doing things Googlers are good at and they got adcquired, and those startups' ideas weren't so wild (according with the second advice in that interview).
And I didn't say they have additional responsibilities to the market at all. I was just making the case that to limit choice of your partners (and, therefore, your consumers) to kill your competitors is evil. It is what Microsoft did with OEMs and it is what Apple is doing with developers.
Is is perfectly possible to kill a competitor without being evil. The best example is Facebook. I don't think Facebook would ban a developer for using a Google API or a compatibility layer that make games work in Myspace too. They even allow multiple payment platforms!