Netscape Navigator sorta did a lot of their own downfall to themselves. I remember still purchasing Netscape Navigator 3.3 Gold to avoid having to use the inferior IE 2/3. I hated IE, all of my peers (ironically all of us were MCSE's at the time) hated IE, and we used anything we could to avoid using IE.

But they kept getting more and more bloated. When Mozilla finally came about, it was free, it was less bloated and I moved to it. In the interim between Navigator and Mozilla, I purchased Opera. You compete with free by just being a better option and people know that you're a better option.

That's my take. It doesn't always work though. People will take the free route when they can.

Before GMail, Hotmail (pre-Microsoft purchase)... and Yahoo Mail. So it's not like they didn't walk into a situation there where the competition wasn't already free... but it was already huge. In that one case, they just made it seem better, and earlier on... they made it "exclusive" where people just WANTED an invite so badly that they'd switch anyway. Smart move on Google's part, imho.

So that's a place where guerrilla marketing worked well.

But back to Android... I think honestly them pulling out the Android code from the kernel was... smart. They're so behind in so many forks that I stopped watching. It's beneficial, I just hope they hurry up and get back to mainline or else I fear the naysayers will have a field day with the "evil" chants.

It's funny how "evil" has been placed on IBM, to Microsoft to Google and Apple now in my lifetime. I wonder who's next?

My bet is on Oracle.