Lenovo is the world’s largest PC manufacturer right now, who’s also taken a lot of interest in making Android tablets and phones lately, but its president has arrived at the conclusion that Android will never work combined with Windows. That’s actually not very different from what I’ve already said.
“I don’t see it [Intel’s Android on Windows plan] as being a mass-market opportunity in the near future or maybe even long-term,” Lenovo North American president Jay Parker told VentureBeat in an interview yesterday. “I believe the market can support multiple operating systems and ecosystems.”
As I’ve said in my previous article, this Windows/Android dual-booting deal only really benefits Intel, and nobody else (not Google, not Microsoft, and not even the user), because Intel is trying really hard to find at least one major advantage over ARM. Of course, there’s the performance advantage we all know about, but that didn’t seem to have slowed down the explosive mobile market, based on ARM chips, so far.
People thought dual-core 1Ghz ARM processors were “overkill” for mobile, not too long ago, and now we get things like Tegra K1, which has PC-level graphics. So in practice, Intel’s Core i7 advantage, or the performance of their other PC chips really doesn’t matter at all. Mobile operating systems and apps are also a lot leaner (bloat-free), so they tend to work much better than a typical “PC program” too, even with weaker chips.
So for a company like Lenovo, which is already making both Android and Windows devices, the dual-booting hybrid thing presents no real advantage, because if people want Android, they can offer them Android, and if they want Windows, they can offer them Windows. It’s actually much better for both manufacturers and users, to keep these operating systems as separated as possible, for the purpose of competition.
Let’s imagine that there would be no more “Android devices” on the market, but all of them would be “Windows devices” but with an integrated “Android option” (which is what’s really happening here). Eventually Microsoft would use their typical Embrace Extend Extinguish tactic to kill off (or hide as much as possible) that Android option, until the users forget about it. Then we’d be stuck only with Windows again, which would be bad for users (no real choices), but also for manufacturers, who won’t have any negotiating power against Microsoft (just like before).
The Lenovo president understands that it’s better for both users and themselves to be able to pick from multiple operating systems.