We have word that Acer has called off a smartphone launch with Alibaba at the eleventh hour, with Alibaba (the biggest e-commerce company in China that did mull over purchasing a controlling stake in Yahoo) citing that pressure from Google on Acer was the main reason behind being ditched. Acer and Alibaba’s cloud computing unit originally intended to roll out the Acer CloudMobile A800 smartphone that ran on Alibaba’s very own mobile operating system known as Aliyun, but journalists who turned up for the event were prevented from entering the venue, with an Alibaba Cloud Computing official claiming the launch was canceled due to internal reasons.
A statement from Alibaba later mentioned the following, “Our partner received notification from Google that if the new product launch with Aliyun went ahead, Google would terminate Android product cooperation and related technical authorization with Acer.” There was no response from Google to this allegation, while Acer’s Shanghai-based spokeswoman Elaine Cao remained silent. What do you think of the situation?