Hmmmm
Personally I have to say I sit in the middle on this one. Whilst some of Steve's arguments are vaugely viable I can see that he's being very short sighted.
I don't think Googles attempts with Android are to get more people to "search" through google at all really, as pointed out I think it's about creating brand awareness but also putting something out there which ultimatley will probably be developed into a very powerful OS and like it or not knock WM. However I do have reservations, blackberry for example (in my experience looking after messaging for a large company) have an excellent platform, it's not perfect but in terms of handset stability, predictability and backend reliability it's pretty good. YES before anyone says anything I know we've seen the relay fall over a few times but actually those times are fairly limited compared with the number of times our mobile telco has randomly dropped data in our area and uptime is certainly more than our active sync users.
Is it the iPhone? Nope,, certainly not, if it had blackberry connect would it be more attractive to enterprise? - yes probably, but I'm not so sure it will compete with blackberry handsets and software, 4.5 for the 83xx series for example wraps up a lot of previous issues and whilst RIM have generally failed to do anything groundbreaking the storm is a sign of things to come...
It's a shame that Microsoft can't get Windows Mobile right, quite why they believe that medium/ent's want a bunch of devices they can't control and have no visability of hanging off the end of their network is beyond me, releasing an expesnive and poorly supported (in the handset market) BES equivilant (System Centre Mobile DM) is frankly just poor, they should have had this wrapped up a long time ago if they wanted to compete.
Personally I can see windows mobile lasting on devices, not sure if those devices will be phones and then I think that's where Google can step up the game a little, or a very creative business can step in and develop a paid version of Android that picks up where windows mobile left off.
The trouble with Microsoft it seems is that they are very polarised, some things they do are far too whacky and people fail to see where they fit in, and some things they do are so far in the past that people laugh but still go out and buy the stuff anyway, just because it's easier not to push the limits of what you are trying to do. Characters like Stevie boy don't really help their cause, but it does get them media exposure.