Don't be so sure!

The biggest kick in the nuts for Lodsys in that letter is when Apple says "Lodsys's threatened claims are barred by the doctrines of patent exhaustion and first sale". As I read it: because Apple have already paid for a patent license for each iOS device that they sell, no-one can demand another license fee. It's already licensed and paid for. Lodsys is effectively asking to be paid multiple times for the same device, which they can't do.

So, assuming that Google and others are similarly licensed to Apple, Lodsys would not be entitled to any fees from apps on unofficial mods and third-party stores. That's because the Android mod or third-party apps could only run on devices which are already licensed — the mod or app might not license the patent directly, but each user of the mod or app effectively has, because Google or Apple or whoever paid their license fee to IV for the device. It could be that almost every owner of a smartphone in the world is already licensed for this patent, which would make Lodsys feel sick in the stomach (if trolls have stomachs?)

(Remember IANAL and IV got paid for the Apple license, not Lodsys, but who got paid makes no difference)

The HTML5 technologies that ChromeOS will use for offline functionality are really designed to synchronise with the original server. So when Google Docs or your network goes down, you will be able to keep working on your document. But if you want to take your document somewhere else — say take a copy home as a file on a USB stick — you can't. Exporting documents is done in the cloud, not by the browser, so your document is stuck on your machine. You just have to wait until Google Docs works again so it can sync back up and then export it.

That is almost exactly the same as the PS3 outage. The PS3 console and games continue to work as normal offline, but you can't play online and you can't switch to a competing provider of online games. In a major outage of Google Docs, your ChromeOS would continue to work as normal offline, but you wouldn't be able to take the document anywhere or give it to someone else — and you wouldn't be able to switch to a competing provider like Office Live — because your data is stuck in the Google cloud. One day Google may fix this, but at the moment you would be stuck.

The problem here is being reliant on one company. On a desktop computer with a full operating system you've got myriad alternatives and competing solutions for any problem. On the PS3 and ChromeOS you've got a very simple-to-use system that's normally all you need; but if it fails then you're stuck with no alternative.