Posted over at stevenf.com:

As this article points out, “Ballmer said it was Google’s first phone operating system and designing one wasn’t easy. ‘They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people… but, you know, they start out way behind in a certain sense.’”  I think Ballmer is under the impression that in order to build something great, it has to be as complicated as Windows is – which we all know is not the case.  Google has a great track record of building very successful simple applications.  Has Microsoft been paying any attention?

For companies like Microsoft, it’s hard to see the big picture.  This sounds like a funny accusation to make for a company that has their hands in so many different sectors - and has such a big company to begin with that it seems they ARE the big picture.  But that is precisely their problem.  They’re missing the fact that they are not the big picture.  Microsoft does not have the best and only method for producing or marketing an application.  Other companies have so much potential to compete with the Microsoft Monster.  Microsoft has spread itself so thin across different products and offerings (and even within these products, spread themselves thin across so many different features) that their company really isn’t a very “scary monster” (think cute and fluffy).

Ballmer was wrong about the mobile market just last year in April at the USA Today CEO Forum when he said of the iPhone:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get. ”

Apple surpassed Microsoft in market share way back in February and now they are slated to beat out RIM and take the number one spot.  Could Ballmer have been more wrong?  Ouch. 

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that Ballmer is definitely wrong about Android, I just want to assure you that the certainty of his remarks provide no real insight into the future of the situation on the mobile frontier, or the popularity of Google’s new operating system.  I get the feeling that Ballmer feels Google is going in the wrong direction simply because they don’t tackle problems the same way as Microsoft.  Be assured that just because Google isn’t doing things the Microsoft way, this doesn’t mean they’re doing things the wrong way – in fact, it may very well mean the opposite.

The video is unnecessarily long, but it shows how simple the unlock process is.

UPDATE: The G1 is painfully slow on AT&T’s network because the 3G network for AT&T runs on a different frequency than the 3G network for T-Mobile.  The G1 will still work with AT&T, but only on their EDGE network.

Mono on the iPhone isn’t very likely to take off.  The platform is closed off at its low level, even to developers that are signed up for the program.  Sure, Mono might make a slight impact on the percentage of people that Jailbreak their phones, but the lack of popularity will kill any growth it might have.  I suspect that by the time it could feasibly work, there will be a better platform that we’ve all adopted that again – doesn’t work with Mono.

Android however seems to hold more promise for Mono.  With complete source to the entire Android Operating System I can see Mono making an effective entry onto Android phones.

I was able to get it up and running in about an hour (including the download time for all required software).  Better yet, I was able to get this running on my Vista machine (I didn’t need a Mac!), and it can also be easily set up on some flavors of Linux.  The instructions to get things started was rather simple.  I just followed what I found on Google’s Android site.  I’m using Eclipse with the Android Plugin, which seems to work great.  The emulator for the phone is also functional and looks polished.

All I’ve really done is inspected the SDK and elaborated on the “Hello, Android” application that Google walks you through. What’s great about it is the fact that it was so easy to get up and running, and it uses a language that I’m more familiar with (Java as compared to say… Objective C 2.0 . I think that language familiarity alone will steer more people towards Android over the iPhone. Heck, I remember programming Java in highschool…

More to come as I start diving into the SDK.