What Others Say:
Chetan Sharma of Chetan Sharma Consulting: Google definitely assembled an impressive list of partners for this initiative. On a fundamental level, it still remains to be seen if this move is going to transform the industry. Of course, everyone wants to be seen supporting openness, proof will be in the implementation and the business models that support this vision, otherwise this is just yet another initiative.
The initiative does help lower the cost of the handset due to cheap licenses for the stack and if this proves successful, some device manufacturers might give up their own efforts to minimize cost and focus more on hardware features that integrate well with Android. This is more an answer to Microsoft than to the carrier fragmentation Google has talked about. Is this going to be a successful Trojan horse strategy for Google remains to be seen.