What you are highlighting with regard to the UI changes is one of the symptoms of fragmentation that many commentators are criticizing Android over, with some justification.

Actually I've never voted for any of them. And I think this is little beyond party politics at this stage don't you?

I live in Ireland, and like many Irish people I'm sick about hearing about the economy. Things on the ground in Ireland are actually pretty good: people are still spending so VAT income is good, and our exports are doing well throughout this recession. It is widely predicted that we will have a medium-term export led recovery. The problem we have is that the financial markets are not prepared to lend to us at less that an exorbitant interest rate of ~8% due to the perception that our deficient is massive, which is an anomaly due to the EU forcing us to include our own internal bank bailout (NAMA) on the countries balance sheet. Basically our problems are at the macro level not at the micro level: lots of Irish companies including the one I work for are still doing very well in this tough global economy thank you. The only reason we have to go to EU & IMF for funding at 5% interest is because the markets are screwing us at 8%. It is the markets that are hurting us, not corporations like Google etc. which are creating a lot of wealth in the country with the high salaries they pay.

...and Android has not won it. There is still iOS, webOS, RIM, BREW, WP7, and probably some others that I can't remember. Why not compete in this fragmented market with MeeGo? Eventually we may settle on a single dominant platform, but I don't think Android will become that platform as it is already fragmented within itself due to OEMs "tweaking" the platform to suit their own product differentiation needs, and Google allowing them to do so. MeeGo, like all of these others, has a fighting chance.

I found the genuine panic from many Facebook users to this outage very amusing.

Google may not be operating a monopoly in the strictest sense, but they do clearly dominate the search market. If you run a website and Google decides to downgrade your rank or even drop you from their index altogether, then your site effectively drops off the Internet. This can ruin an online business.