Comment by patcon
3 months ago
I was a big proponent of the nexus phones and Google's efforts in the space, but I am hundred percent not an android fan anymore.
There's a study on positive or destructive workers, from a business management pov. The finding was that the "bad" employees and the "good" are often the same people: a "good" employee scorned becomes the worst type of employee.
I think Google will be discovering some variant of this from their previous fandom, and it will be too late.
You seem to be framing this as if it were a business decision to curtail competition. I and likely the team pushing these changes only see the security benefits for users through these changes. People have tinted lenses to assume malice when Google does things, but if you've actually ever been close to the decision making process internally it's never anything close to what people seem to imagine. People are overestimating how problematic these changes will be in practice.
Too late for whom though? I suspect it's not Google. The only companies with enough capital to take them on at their own game are somehow even worse, although admittedly the gap is getting narrower by the second.
And yeah, giants occasionally fall suddenly. But mostly just in the software world. Phones require extensive hardware and software knowledge, and increasingly also require playing nice with carriers/TLA government agencies.