Google continues to struggle to make you believe that they can do more than create search engines, online services, email software, and various odds and ends. With the Android OS, they want you to believe that you can get a reliable, state-of-the-art and open ecosystem for your smartphone or tablet. They even hope to make a splash in the computer operating system universe, but that may be a much harder nut to crack.

Now this isn’t to say that Android is bad. Clearly Google has been working really hard to expand the reach of Android to more and more smartphones. But the vaunted openness may be a mirage. There are published reports, growing out of a recent unfair business practices lawsuit against Google from Skyhook. Skyhook’s allegations, if taken as true, reveal deep restrictions over how Android can be used and configured by various handset makers. Confirming some of this are reports that Google has withheld releasing the source code of the latest and greatest version of Android for tablets, in order to limit the number of licensees and have greater control over the way they tailor the OS to their individual needs.

No doubt this is an outgrowth of the growing fragmentation problem in Android land. Handset makers have traditionally altered the OS with their own custom themes and added features to make their products seem unique rather than generic. Bundled apps and even the default Google search engine may be changed by wireless carriers. So the customer can’t be assured that one Android smartphone is the same as another when it comes to the user interface. And forget about getting needed upgrades to the OS, to fix bugs and security problems. It’s not as if you can just go to Google and download a copy, unless you’re willing to hack — or jailbreak — your Android OS device to receive an unvarnished version.

Although loads of Android smartphones have been sold, Android tablets haven’t fared so well. The OS remains buggy, unfinished, and these gadgets have, in large part, received tepid reviews even from journalists who aren’t exactly fans of Apple. This has left Apple with the tablet market pretty much to themselves, as the iPad steamrolls the competition.

Yes, I’m sure Google continues to invest huge amounts of cash to build a better tablet OS, but making poor first impressions is only going to convince potential customers to consider iPads and little else.

The latest Google effort, such as it is, is a PC-oriented OS called Chrome, which, like the browser of the same name, is essentially a browser and little else. The first group of Chrome OS note-books are showing up, at least for tech media reviewers, and they reveal the good and bad points of this minimalist approach.

Basically, you can use any app, so long as it can run within your browser. File management, beyond a tiny solid state drive, is restricted to the cloud. Imagine, for example, if your Mac shipped strictly with Safari installed, without the ability to add any other apps (even browsers). Could you survive within that environment? And do you really feel confident about the cloud in light of those recent failures at Amazon and even Microsoft?

I suppose many of you can. You can certainly access your email online; even ISPs offer browser-based access for customers who might use a friend’s computer, or one at a library. With Google Apps, and Microsoft’s Office alternative, you can actually do productive work in the cloud, and the files you make will be similarly stored online.

Unfortunately, if you lose your online access, you’re left with a brick. Even if the files could be stored locally, how do you run apps that require online access to function? Well, I suppose you could allow them to run offline, and perhaps add the ability to install extra apps directly on the computer’s drive, but suddenly the no-frills Chrome OS would simply become little more than another Linux-based OS, and they haven’t done so well in the consumer market.

This isn’t to say that cloud-based storage is bad, or running Web apps presents difficulties, so long, as I said, there’s a way to use those apps and create files on your local storage device when Internet access is unavailable. But this is nothing that you can’t already do on a traditional Mac or Windows computer. What advantage is Google offering, other than the speedier boot time because there’s less to load? Even that will become a non-issue as more and more solid state drives are used on Macs and PCs.

In the real world, Google will have a stiff climb with the Chrome OS. Reviewers haven’t greeted those prototype note-books with much enthusiasm. Yes, they are cheap, but no cheaper than a regular low-end Windows portable. Why pay the same for fewer features? Is there any practical reason for a customer to consider such a product, other than as a potentially needless indulgence?

I suppose Google will continue to work on the Chrome OS in hopes of taking the concept somewhere, but I rather think it’ll join a long line of “beta” products and services that Google has tried and failed to perfect.

The questions of Internet security are filling blogs and news reports more often these days. Both Apple and Google recently appeared in Congress to explain their privacy policies, in the wake of the discovery that the Location feature of iOS devices was flawed. Security researchers discovered this “nasty secret,” that the tracking file created to allow these gadgets to know, roughly speaking, where you are at any particular time, were not being deleted when Location was switched off.

As usual with such sessions, politicians use the opportunity to posture and swagger in the guise of asking critical questions about problems that might affect their constituents. They hope for the sound bites that will lead broadcast news and cable outlets that evening, not to mention the ads in the next campaign season.

This time, Apple beat Congress to the punch, making most of the critical fixes to the iOS ahead of that session. So, the tracking cache won’t be copied to iTunes as part of your backup, data over seven days old will be removed, and, if you turn the thing off, it is really off. The latter was, according to Apple, a bug. It wasn’t meant to work that way.

At the same time, there came reports of a new effort a social engineering involving fake Mac security software. This is the sort of problem that already exists on the Windows platform, where an app pretends to scan your computer, and warns you of non-existent virus infections. You want to get rid of them? Buy a license for the app and you will be perfectly safe. But not safe from someone who wants to steal your hard-earned money for a service that doesn’t do anything — other than line the pockets of the developers.

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You just knew that Apple had caught a breeze when the iPod became a cultural icon representing digital music players. It was the product to which all comers were compared, and they ended up wanting. One by one, the iPod killers arrived, and one by one they failed, or gained a minor share of the market only sufficient to keep a smaller company in business.

Microsoft tried to go up against their traditional rival in two ways. First, with their PlaysForSure licensing scheme, they hoped to sign up loads of hardware makers to build gear that would soon overwhelm the iPod, but it didn’t happen. In the face of that failure, Microsoft double-crossed their partners and built an integrated ecosystem, modified a failed Toshiba digital media player, and introduced the Zune. “Welcome to the Social,” said the ads, but the young people who really discovered social networking weren’t taken in. They stuck with their iPods. The Zune has since been discontinued, representing another ignominious failure for Microsoft.

I remember once observing some young men hanging out outside a local convenience store hoping to sell a couple of Zunes. I didn’t bother to consider whether they were stolen, or the owners were just struggling to ind buyers for gadgets they didn’t like. Nobody paid attention.

Even today, where the market for such gear has plateaued, the iPod is still supreme by a hefty margin. Although sales are on a slow, inexorable decline, don’t forget that the iPhone and iPad also contain an iPod app, with all features intact. If you combine all the sales, they continue to soar, even though integrated products have become far more popular than the separate device, except for people who want something real cheap.

The iPhone was the impossible dream. What did Apple know about smartphones anyway? There were loads of good products available; the market was near-saturated, so where does Apple get off trying to build such a thing? It’s not the same as the digital media player space, where no one product had sold terribly well until the iPod came along and sales exploded.

Today, Apple, as a company, earns more revenue from smartphones than general purpose handset makers that participate in many product categories. Whenever a smartphone is reviewed, there is that inevitable comparison to the iPhone. Just the other day, I read a report that AT&T’s $49 iPhone 3GS, a model that was originally released in 2009, still outsells many current products featuring the Android OS. It argues for Apple continuing to build an older model at a cheaper price, or just creating a lower cost iPhone.

When the tech media attempts to remind you that more Android OS phones are sold in the U.S. than iPhones, many ignore the fact that Google’s smartphone OS is not a brand, really. Each handset maker is free to modify the OS the way they want, with custom user interface themes, bundled software, and perhaps a different default search engine. What’s more, no single Android smartphone has managed to best the iPhone in sales.

After years of telling us that the year of the tablet was at hand, Microsoft was embarrassed to discover that the breakthrough product came from Apple, the iPad, which many first dismissed as nothing more than an oversized iPod touch. It can’t be a real tablet, because real tablets were basically modified PCs running Windows. Rather than figure out how to build a better tablet, it appears Microsoft prefers to ignore the question, and waste their money buying Skype. I can’t see how that is going to help them figure out a strategy to compete not just with the iPad, but with tablets featuring the Android OS.

The real issue is whether this is a tablet market, or an iPad market. If it’s the latter, efforts to compete head on will be doomed to failure. Yes, some companies may sell a few hundred thousand copies of one product or another, but they will all be compared to Apple’s new cultural icon. Unless Apple really builds a bad iPad, with loads of bugs, and other show-stopping problems, the momentum won’t slow anytime soon.

Even today, weeks after the iPad 2 was released, you still have to wait one to two weeks to get one from Apple’s online store, which ought to have the best selection. You may find them at your local dealers, but you can’t be assured that the exact model you want will be available.

Supposedly Apple is not being seriously impacted by supply constraints due to that tragic earthquake in Japan, but they are clearly struggling to boost production. That’s a nice problem to have, but it doesn’t seem as if other companies are benefitting much from the difficulties in getting an iPad. As I said, it’s an iPad market, not a tablet market.

So far as PCs are concerned, sales are mostly flat, except for Macs, which continue to do well even in the business world that was once hostile to the platform. Despite an economic climate where people just don’t have as much disposable income as they used to, they are willing to pay more for a Mac, knowing that they are more reliable than Windows boxes, and that the cost of upkeep over a period of several years is usually less than a PC.

If anyone is going to supplant Apple as the builder of cultural icons, it may be Apple, if they make some serious missteps. But even if Steve Jobs leaves the company, it doesn’t appear that they will suffer seriously for a number of years.

My recent comments have probably echoed that of many other commentators, that if Microsoft is on a death spiral, it would be a slow decline, one that would require years to totally reverse their standing as one huge money-making machine. But now it appears as if Microsoft is doing their level best to speed up the process.

Take the curious decision to waste over $8.5 billion in spare cash to buy up Skype, a company that has yet to demonstrate the ability to actually deliver even decent revenues despite having a huge user base.

Now I wouldn’t resume to suggest that Skype is a worthless property. With hundreds of millions of members — and over 20 million online at any one time — it’s clear that Skype has attracted one large user base. On the other hand, the vast majority of those users restrict themselves to the free portions of the service. Although you can use Skype to place and receive calls to regular telephones and mobile handsets, only a little over eight million see fit to take advantage of that service. At the same time, though, Skype is reported to be the world’s largest provider of international phone calls.

The real issue is just how all this fits in with Microsoft’s product strategy, and that press conference featuring CEO Steve Ballmer, along with Skype CEO Tony Bates, was rather less than illuminating.

Now I understand why a tech company might want to buy out a competitor, or a firm that can offer new and desperately needed technology. But Microsoft already has chat software in place that provides text, audio, and video, and that’s Windows Live Messenger, which is known as Microsoft Messenger on the Mac platform. The quality of this product appears to be decent enough, so where’s the benefit of adding Skype?

Sure, Skype offers paid services, and can act, for the most part anyway, as a regular Internet telephone provider. But I fail to see why Microsoft, with its vast staff of talented developers, couldn’t provide an in-house solution. Sure, the name “Skype” is an icon, and there’s an intangible value as a result. But, as I said, Skype is no money-making machine, and what is Microsoft going to do in order to justify that huge investment?

Certainly, stockholders deserve an answer, but nothing in that press conference appeared very illuminating on that issue. If Microsoft increases the external calling rates for Skype, customers might simply look to other solutions. Yes, there will likely be targeted ads present when you use Skype’s free services, in the fashion of Google, but is that going to magically generate billions of dollars of revenue? I hardly think so, although I don’t pretend to be an expert on the advertising business.

But I wouldn’t dismiss the real reason Microsoft might have been so eager to grab up Skype at such an exorbitant premium, and that’s Google. There have been published reports that both Face-book and Google were in the market for Skype. Microsoft might have been desperate, hoping against hope that they could swing a deal to keep Skype from falling into the hands companies that it regards as fierce competitors in the online universe, particularly Google.

Thus, Microsoft offered a deal Skype’s executives couldn’t refuse. Even if this questionable marriage falls apart after money changes hands, Skype’s owners will be laughing all the way to the bank. The real issue is how Steve Ballmer is supposed to explain all this to Microsoft’s stockholders in a way that makes sense. He couldn’t do that in a room filled with journalists either, although it’s also true that he seldom gets anything more than softball questions at such events.

Now according to published reports, the regulatory hurdles will be overcome by the end of the year, so you probably shouldn’t expect any changes in Skype — for better or worse — until 2012. While all this is going on, it’s quite likely Skype’s developers will be treading water, avoiding any significant changes in the network or software until the fallout from the merger is known.

The other issue is how Microsoft is going to solve their real problems, with a declining PC market and, except for game consoles, no proven track record to establish products and services that will ultimately become larger profit centers than Windows software and services.

That’s the magic bullet that Apple discovered years ago, when the arrival of the iPod presaged a new direction for our favorite fruit company. These days, Apple makes most of their revenue from the sale of mobile gadgets, not Macs, although Mac sales continue to grow ahead of most of the rest of the PC industry. When the Mac era is over and done with, it’s likely Apple will continue to prosper without missing a beat.

This is not to say that Microsoft is finished. IBM managed a rebirth as a services-oriented company. I suppose Microsoft, if the situation proves desperate enough, will find ways to survive. But that will likely require dumping Steve Ballmer and the rest of the company’s failed leaders, and going on a hiring spree to attract executive talent to guide the company into the future. The question is whether that’ll happen before it’s too late.