Well, that is complete a caricature of what I was saying, so it's not a serious response.

First of all, I was not knocking Google's overall universe of products and services. It's very impressive and should be appreciated, undertstood, and feared by all of it's competitors. Indeed, it's so strategically ahead of all it's competitors that I have consistently said, if you read all my posts, that I think Android will be the dominant mobile platform eventually.

My criticism of Google/Android is twofold. First, as others have argued, Android is not a completely open platform. This intrinsically poses limits on the options users will have and this will only increase in the long run, as users get more and more locked into the Google universe. Second and related, as we ought to all know from the Windows experience, once a platform becomes so dominant that it essentially has a monopoly, the limitations only increase and the possibility for competition falls by the wayside. This would be true for any platform, it just happens that Google/Android will be, I believe, the dominant mobile platform.

Now, if there has to be a dominant platform, I think it would be better that it be something more open like Maemo. Maemo's openness would allow for more choices and more freedom over what you do with your device, as the available products and services grow. Yes it's nice to have a slick highly integrated set of services like Apple offers or Google, but that always involves giving up a lot of choices (look at Apple's capricious review process for the app store, that has not gone without imposing limits on political speech). Also, Google's massive and ever growing data base of user behavior, cross referenced by IP address and no doubt every other way possible, should frighten anyone who remotely values their privacy. Google may be using it for purely commercial purposes, but history shows, it's only a matter of time before governments and other entities abuse access to this kind of information.

So I think these issues are worth considering, when comparing the Droid and the N900 and deciding which platform one wants to get invested in.

I also think we're probably living in the hay day of platform options right now. The market will narrow and we'll all look back at this time wistfully.