When figuring out which companies to work with we are often sifting through tea leaves looking for hints of future success. Do they say the right things? Are they focused on the right priorities? Do we align with sales and products and do I believe the past is an indicator of the future for this organization?

The mobile market has been my home for the past 14 years and I have tried to read between the lines for each one for quite some time. A couple of weeks ago two companies were both being hounded by the press. Their reactions to press comments are quite revealing. Here’s Company #1:

It may seem odd, but from my perspective, this [criticism] means we are being taken very seriously. [Company #1] is an important company and it’s under scrutiny from journalists—this [being criticized] is exactly how it’s supposed to work. Now it’s our job to prove the reporters wrong so they can write an article later about how we have made dramatic progress.

Company #2:

I don’t think that’s fair. A lot of the people who want this want a secure and free extension of their [Company #2 Product].

I should also note that Company #2’s co-CEO stood up and walked out on a BBC interview because he apparently didn’t like the question.

If the last paragraph didn’t clue you in, Company #2 is RIM. I have never heard a company more defensive than this one. Sure it is being attacked from all sides these days but that is war and RIM needs to fight.

The first quote is Biz Stone of Twitter, whose company has also been blasted in the press and by customers recently for a number of things, including the advertising quickbar which was renamed dickbar by customers and removed shortly thereafter. His quote is much more conciliatory, much more accepting of the role of the press and much more positive in its outlook. (He may curse them out privately but he isn’t publicly!)

Now… which company seems to be more stable and which company — both of which are trying to attract developers — comes across as the more appropriate partner? That answers easy.

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For the record, we don’t develop with Twitter’s API and have developed for the BlackBerry. Also, for the record, I played with the PlayBook for about two minutes last night. My first impressions? Nice UI and navigation once you know how to use it but generally unintuitive (it was explained to me and then it made sense), the on/off button is the worst I have ever seen (I couldn’t turn it on or off) and the device felt heavy for its size. Not enough time to play with the apps but those can be fixed more easily then hardware and fundamental design decisions anyway.

Hypocrite (noun): “a person who feigns some desirable or publicly approved attitude, especially one whose private life, opinions, or statement belie his or her public statements.”

John Gruber said yesterday about Google executives deciding that changes to the Android operating system need approval first, “Andy Rubin, Vic Gundotra, Eric Schmidt: shameless, lying hypocrites, all of them.”

I say: pretty strong words. If we remove a couple of words from the definition then Gruber is right: Google has been hypocritical. Justin Williams called it “bait-and-switch” because of all the keynotes and marketing campaigns and ideals put forth by Google toward openness of the OS. And that is true. Google did take a very strong stance that the Android operating system is open, which was a publicly approved attitude per the definition, and is now doing an about face and closing it off.

This is a huge change for Google and one I applaud. The old model was just not tenable. No one — and I mean no one except carriers and those manipulating the OS for their nefarious gains — liked what was happening to Android. As developers it was too many minute changes on too many platforms. It wasn’t one Android, it was 5000 of them: Verizon’s Android, AT&T’s Android, HTC’s Android, Motorola’s Android, Samsung’s Android, etc. And as developers we had to pick and choose which Android we would support.

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If we look deeper into the meaning of hypocrite, though, the word “public” and “private” are prominently included. By definition, to be a hypocrite, you have to lead one life publicly and a different life privately. And Google hasn’t done that.

Android has been open both publicly and privately — until now. And now Android is closing the platform. The first hints came last week when Google decided not to open Honeycomb (Android 3.0). But it is this news, the news that Google will require Android licensees to approve their changes with the company, that moves the company decidedly more closed.

Because their openness was both public and private and their more closed stance is the same, Google has not been hypocritical. Learning and adjusting and changing to the market is reality.

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To me, though, this leaves as many questions as it answers.

Why did Google do it? Did they do it because some licensees and n0n-licensees (such as RIM and Amazon) are using Android’s openness against Google? Or did Google do this because they too are sick of the spyware, sick of the fragmentation, concerned about the impact on the brand “Android” and on the developer community?

What does Android’s new “closeness” mean for the current licensees? Motorola is rumored to be working on their own OS. Samsung has one already. What does HTC decide to do? Will this just fracture the market further and mean new operating systems when we were finally seeing consolidation?

How will developers react? Does this make us more likely to write apps for Android? Will the Android unit numbers stay as high as they are or will this cause a shift in focus to Windows Phone 7, iOS and RIM?

But most importantly I want to know where the line between closed and open is for Google? Does the company become more transparent in the way it works with licensees? Are developers clued into the areas where third-parties can change the OS and where they can’t? How closed is closed?

How come when smartphone and tablet news comes it comes in bunches? This time its Apple and RIM and Android. My thoughts on each:

Apple’s WWDC and “Delayed” iPhone 5

Apple opened up the World Wide Developer Conference yesterday morning and sold it out in 12 hours. Google’s similar conference, i/o, sold out in less than an hour the last time it was offered. This is amazingly fast and demonstrates the interest the developer community has in iOS and Google Android development. Horace Dediu over at Asymco wrote another great post on the topic:

Developers certainly seem to sense the way the wind is blowing. They are, as humans, prone to over-confidence but they are also often accused of being hard to please. The most common lament among new platform builders is “How do we attract developers?”  The platforms showcased here had no trouble attracting developers in the tens of thousands three years after being launched.

At the same time, the rumors started to fly about iPhone 5 being “delayed” until fall. (I put delayed in quotes because Apple really can’t delay an un-announced device. They are just releasing it at a different time of year this year.)

Personally I think this is brilliant. WWDC is a developer conference and should be focused on the operating system. It makes perfect sense for Apple to introduce its latest and greatest iOS in June and ship new devices in August and September, just in time for Christmas and back-to-school.

RIM Playbook Supports Every Developer Platform Imaginable

The latest scuttle-butt is that RIM is making it possible for Android developers, among others, to write apps that run in an emulator on the Playbook. Personally, I think this is RIM’s future if they want developers. Most of us developers will only develop for one or two platforms, leaving the rest out. Clearly those two platforms, right now, are Android and iOS. And RIM needs apps for the PlayBook now.

Anyone who has followed RIM for a long time will note that the company has tried to work with other device manufacturers and platforms for years. BlackBerry Connect was such an effort, making it possible for third-parties such as Symbian and Palm to work with BlackBerry’s Enterprise Server (BES).

Does this make RIM stupid as no one will ever develop for BlackBerry and the PlayBook? Not stupid. RIM and others who see advantages to writing native apps can do that while the majority of us who normally wouldn’t consider PlayBook can now make our apps run on the device.

As for only supporting the phone version of Android, version 2.3, well duh. Google hasn’t released version 3.0 to developers yet so RIM can’t make an emulator from it. And that leads us right to…

Google “Closes” Android 3.0

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, Google hasn’t released Honeycomb, its first tablet version of Android (3.0) to developers yet and the developer community is up-in-arms that Google is finally showing that Android is a closed platform, not an open one.

I have used open source software for years now, primarily on our web servers but often in source code. Traditionally open source software appeals mostly to the techno-geeks among us, not to consumers.

Google has to walk a fine line here. Android, after all, is an OS used by consumers (unlike most Linux installs which are used by technologists) and they need it to work well for those customers. Putting out half-baked code that was rushed to market, as Google claims was the case to get a tablet out there, doesn’t help anyone except the technologists who feel they should be able to play with the source code. (The fact that Google released half-baked code is another issue entirely.)

I take Google at their word on this. They have some work to do to clean it up and then will release it openly. Could Google have a developer track release and an official release as suggested by Watts Martin over at Coyote Tracks? Yes but they don’t (for reasons they haven’t made public).

I have been quiet about the happenings in mobile lately, I know. In particular the big news, Nokia-Microsoft “merger”, went without much of a comment, just a summary article on the week’s events. I’m a wait-and-see kind of person most of the time and frankly had no huge reaction to this one way or the other and didn’t feel like they warranted a post.

For the record, I see positives and negatives for the two companies coming out of this, although my feeling is still relatively negative about Windows Phone 7 and Nokia, with or without this deal. In particular I had this vague feeling of deja-vu running around in my head and must admit I thought more than once about how this sounds like the Palm-Microsoft deal a few years ago.

Apparently I was more right than I thought. Horace Dediu, in The Allegory of Treo, took a 2005 CNet article announcing that Palm was licensing Windows Mobile for Treo devices and replaced the names and objects with Nokia, Windows Phone 7, Steven Elop (Nokia CEO), Steve Ballmer (Bill Gates was still Microsoft CEO then), etc. All I can say is Wow! It’s a perfect match and a must-read.

Now, remind me, how did that work out for Palm?