One couldn't help but notice the slightly smug note of this morning's Google I/O keynote on the upcoming Android OS, codenamed Froyo.

It plays nicely with Flash and HTML 5. It does native and web apps. It makes devices run faster than the iPad. It streams music from iTunes or any other desktop music library. It does painless, wireless tethering. It makes transferring apps from the desktop to mobile completely automatic.

It makes the iPhone look like a clunky, locked-down piece of junk, in so many words.

But why waste time being humble when Android's advances are so significant and so welcomed by developers, users, advertisers and others in the mobile community? The Google execs who presented this morning didn't need to belabor these points; attending developers started cheering the second the slides were flashed onto the huge auditorium screen.

Were these cheers the crazed adulation of loyalists and fanboys? While this room is undoubtedly full of Google fans, there is a case to be made: Google is, in fact, doing it right in a few areas where Apple is doing it wrong.

The company has the advantage of relative — for a major American corporation — openness, a value that has extended to allow for device and network agnosticism, a wide variety of mobile apps, the open-sourcing of a huge amount of code, and now, even more access and choice for users with the Android OS 2.2 upgrades.

The choice to view Flash content is one example of this "openness." Although Google vigorously supports HTML5, it's maintained Flash support because it allows them to serve the needs of users; it's "do as you like," not "do as I say." The company loses no developers and alienates no users with this strategy.

Clearly, there's no wrong way to run a company, unless you're running it into the ground. Google and Apple have each built hugely successful businesses on polar opposite ideologies. And as long as everyone's making money, at least in laissez-faire capitalism, is anyone really wrong?

Time will tell whether Google's brand of "open" will yield long-term growth or whether Apple's increasingly closed and dictatorial approach to consumer electronics will actually pave the way for better devices and features. But at least for today, Google is firing the shots with Froyo, and Apple cannot respond.

image courtesy of iStockphoto, MartinPrescott