Google Android - The Android Log

You won’t hear Microsoft say this out loud, but secretly they are celebrating Google’s contribution of the Android mobile phone platform to the Open Handset Alliance - at least they aught to be. Android is perhaps the best thing to happen to Microsoft since they won the browser wars in the 1990’s. And given Verizon’s announcement yesterday that they will be opening up their network to any device and operating system that meets a “minimum technical standard” it seems that Android may have legs even if Google doesn’t secure the 700 MHz spectrum.

Microsoft’s biggest competitor in the software development industry has been, for the past 12 years, Sun Microsystems’ Java Platform. Starting in the mid to late 1990’s Java began to gain mind share among developers in every area in which Microsoft has an interest. Today, with over 6 million developers (according to Sun) Java clearly dominates the software development industry. Point in fact, Microsoft had to completely revamp their software development platform in 2000 to mimic the Java platform in order to complete; enter Microsoft .NET. While Microsoft .NET has been extremely successful at winning back a portion of the developer community from the Java platform, Java has remained the darling of the enterprise and perhaps the most successful software development platform in the history of computing. Microsoft really doesn’t like the Java platform very much. Java is Microsoft’s biggest competitor in software development and is arguably the platform to beat.

Google’s cunning plan to bypass the Java license might not be cunning enough, depending on how Sun decides to play it and if they see Android as a significant threat to their Java revenues.

The Android platform can run applications developed for Java Micro Edition (J2ME) but to avoid the restrictions of Java licence Google’s platform takes the Java Byte Code (the faux-machine language into which Java applications are compiled) and converts it to their own virtual machine language: Dalvik.

By this ruse they avoid Android-based devices having to have a Java Virtual Machine, and thus avoid paying Sun for a licence or being forced to open up modifications under the J2ME open source licence.