The ongoing Google versus Oracle trial in the US has already produced a few unexpectedly juicy details, including pics of a prototype smartphone Google was working on back in 2006.
And here's another tasty morsel: Google went into 2011 expecting to shift 10 million Android tablets over the course of the year, which it believed would give it a 33% market share. Not quite.
There's nothing wrong with optimism – there's no point being in business if you don't believe in what you're doing, after all. But what makes hearing those internal projections interesting is that it's probably the closest thing we've had to Google admitting its tablet strategy hasn't worked out as planned.
If you turn the clock back to the end of 2010, Google was preparing to go head-to-head with Apple and its market-dominating iPad with the release of Android 3.0 Honeycomb – the first release of Android aimed specifically at tablets.
The early groundwork done by the first-generation Samsung Galaxy Tab looked set to provide the perfect springboard for a full-blown Android feeding frenzy as all the major Android OEMs lined up their Honeycomb-driven tablet contenders.
We all pretty much took for granted that Android would gain the upper hand on its tablet rivals just as it had with smartphones, through a combination of sheer weight of numbers and OEM-driven innovation, and that the iPad's stranglehold on that tablet market, while impressive, would soon come to an end.
But it simply hasn't worked out that way. The iPad has confounded the sceptics and has sold in greater numbers than anyone expected, including Google: the company's projections were that the tablet market as a whole would have reached 42 million units sold by the end of 2011. In reality, the iPad on its own had already cleared 50 million units by then.
Android Honeycomb, meanwhile, hasn't been nearly as successful as Google's forecasts predicted, and with a few notable exceptions neither have the tablets running it. With the benefit of hindsight, Google's projections now look incredibly naïve, especially when you consider how Android's tablet market share was practically non-existent when the forecast was made.
We'd love to see a more up-to-date version of Google's tablet ambitions, as it certainly wouldn't look anything like this one.
