The Macalope‘s latest column for Macworld nicely sums up why people are so boneheadedly wrong with the whole ‘Android is Microsoft in the mobile wars’ thing:

Everyone wants to compare the Apple/Google mobile OS wars to the Apple/Microsoft desktop wars of the 1990s. But if Compaq ever got out of line, Microsoft always told them to go jump in a proverbial lake. And then it pushed them in an actual lake. Filled with sharks. A special breed of freshwater great white sharks that the company had genetically engineered for that particular purpose. And then it poured petroleum into the lake and lit it on fire.

He argues that Google being ‘forced’ by operators to do things like make Bing (instead of Google) the default (and sometimes impossible to change) search engine means Google’s a world away from Microsoft; it also highlights that Google has significantly less leverage than Microsoft had over PC vendors before mobile became so astonishingly important.

I’d add that it also seems that Google appears to have less leverage than Apple in this space. Can you imagine a carrier forcing Apple to install apps that can’t be deleted, or telling Apple to use Bing for search and also remove Google and Yahoo? Rumours at the moment reckon this is precisely what’s going to happen with a Verizon iPhone in the USA; frankly, I think hell will freeze over first. To that end, one might argue that the company closest to playing the role of Microsoft in the mobile wars is Apple.