James Delahunty
27 Mar 2011 21:16
Reports suggest that Motorola Mobility is working on a web-based operating system for mobile devices.
A report by InformationWeek cites a source close to the company in claiming that Motorola Mobility has amassed experienced mobile and web engineers to work on a new web-based operating system platform. The company could use it as an alternative to Google's Android operating system in its products.
Motorola has hired ex-employees from Apple and Adobe. Gilles Drieu, VP of software engineering at Motorola Mobility, formerly of Apple, joined Motorola five months after leaving Apple. He has worked with WhatWG and W3C, and is reportedly a good candidate for heading up the OS project.
Motorola Mobility has not denied that it is working on an operating system, but did reaffirm its support for Android. "Motorola Mobility is committed to Android as an operating system," a company spokesperson told InformationWeek.
"Google is shooting itself in the foot," the source said, citing concerns about Android fragmentation and product differentiation.