Meanwhile, I continue to believe that having anti-virus software on a Mac actually does more harm than good. You slow down your machine and risk running into one of these false-positive disasters, all in the hopes of blocking viruses that don’t effect your computer, anyway.

I’m not saying that Mac viruses aren’t possible, or that Mac users aren’t dumb enough to fall prey to malware, particularly Trojan Horses. What I’m saying is that when that fateful day comes when a Mac virus makes the rounds through millions of computers all over the globe, McAfee software won’t be ready for it, anyway. And only common sense is going to protect you from a Trojan Horse.

That’s right. Google is suggesting to Verizon users that they just get the Droid Incredible instead. Which makes sense, since the Incredible is a better phone anyway, but that’s the problem with Android. A better Android phone is never more than two months away, so there’s no way for anyone to sell any particular Android phone with any success.

It would be extremely difficult to botch the Nexus One debut any worse than Google did. My guess is that the Nexus One will fade into obscurity by next year, and Google will hope everyone forgets just how huge a FAIL this whole experiment was.

Clearly, Verizon wants to leverage all that money they’ve dumped into the Droid brand, and has no interest in supporting a phone that is Google-branded instead. That makes perfect sense. But it demonstrates just how foolish it was to release Nexus One so soon after the original Droid. Never mind poor Motorola, whose original Droid is already a relic thanks to HTC’s new Droid Incredible.

Do you see how having all these carriers and handset makers pitted against one another causes more problems than it solves? Pretty soon, many of them will figure out that the only company benefitting from Android is Google. And they’ll start looking for alternatives again.

The old-world Microsoft licensing model is dead. No one wants to be pushed around by a giant monopoly anymore.

More importantly, why is Google still getting a pass from the press on these obvious missteps? Just try and picture for a second if Apple were to announce tomorrow that the iPhone were coming to Verizon, and then in August announce that they weren’t going to do that release, after all. Can you even begin to imagine the barrage of negative press that would accompany that?

But the real motivation there, it seems in hindsight, was not so much about having a smaller iPod, but to move Apple’s devices in general towards Flash storage, and more importantly, away from hard drive storage. Try to picture an iPhone with a portable hard drive, instead of Flash memory. Or even the iPad.

Flash RAM prices were far too high at the time to offer large capacities in consumer devices. The entire iPod nano’s existence, then, served as a tool for accelerating the drop of RAM prices over time. Apple took its best-selling product, and turned it into a driving force for future products. Talk about a risk.

Rather than continuing to sell what already worked, Apple made a drastic change that seemed completely unimportant to the average consumer at the time (retaining familiarity, as the above article suggests), but paved the way for the devices of the future.

The iPad would not be possible today at the current price point if it hadn’t been for the nano. And Apple was already thinking about the iPad that long ago.

If you think that’s easy, or that it’s commonplace in the business world to have that kind of foresight, you haven’t been to many design meetings at other companies. Trying to convince a CEO that your top-selling device needs to be dropped in order to prepare for the devices you want to sell in five years is next to impossible at most places. Most people say ‘if it ain’t broke…”

Skate to where the puck is going, indeed.

Anyone who tries to pass off Adobe’s Flash as the open, standards-based choice loses all credibility, as far as I’m concerned.

“Don’t be evil, as long as it’s profitable,” indeed.

And I don’t mean teaming up with a losing technology like Flash, either. Adobe isn’t going to bring great success to Android. It’s a smart strategy for Adobe, for whom Android is their last shot at viability, but I don’t think users care that much about the lack of Flash on mobile devices when all is said and done.