Analysts from J. Gold Associates pulled a Ms. Cleo, pretending they could predict the future. Like Ms. Cleo (back in the day), you saw their prediction EVERYwhere. You couldn’t flip webpages without seeing the same darn rumor: Android & Symbian will merge in the next 3 to 6 months.
As we’ve seen in recent weeks, millions of blogs began to propagate the crackpipe dream into reliable fact, republishing the wishful prediction as inevitable. Then everyone realized the dreads were fake, the Jamaican accent was impersonated and nobodies fortunes were coming true.
Dan Frommer from Silicon Alley Insider summarized it best, “Technical hurdle: You can’t just smoosh two operating systems together. Business hurdle: It’s hard to see either company giving up on their OS right now.”
I don’t think anyone has been “Siked Out” since about 1994… but history just hiccuped. Had it been done in a more Web 2.0 fashion, we could have at least said you were Punkd. But this was just a good old fashioned sike out. Meanwhile, the folks at Fool’s Gold & Associates are like, “IRIE mon. Yah be needin’ to ease-up on da boy, Jah know.”
It could happen… but its really, really not likely. Especially considering representatives from Google, Symbian and Nokia all said it isn’t going to happen. I wonder if LiMo feels lonely that nobody cares enough to include them in the OS mobile merger rumors.
Okay ladies and gentlemen, back to your regularly scheduled programming. Hopefully next time we interrupt you for a rumor, it will be for something a little more sexy… like a new handset? Show of hands?