Whack a Mole - Google’s new AntiTrust Gphone game
OK. I admit it. I don’t get it.
Google’s announcement of an operating system for mobile phones - Android - is being greeted like the second coming in some parts of the media. But have people thought about what is really being announced?
Google bought a company called Android a couple of years ago and has given Rich Miner, (now there’s a good name for a Googler!) a founder of Android, his day in the sun. Probably just about the time his earn-out clause expires.
I’ve nothing against Google delivering services - or adverts - to people on mobile phones (2.5 billion in use, and counting..). I like reading Google’s blogs on things like this.
But would you buy a TV or a DVR from an advertising agency who’d designed it so there’s no way to skip through or block advertising and anything else the ad agency wants to put on the TV? The design spec. of this operating system seems to dictate that no phone manufacturer should be able to block or not give access to Google services.
The parallel is with Microsoft embedding it’s Explorer browser in Windows.
The added “virus” element to the Microsoft model, is that the licence on the code is NOT the normal one for Open Source - any one can take the code and modify it without placing the mods back into the Open Source domain. So the thing will bifurcate, fork, and evolve into a thousand variants (to paraphrase Google’s statements at the announcement).
Google is trying to get the anti-trust authorities to play “whack a mole”!
According to Android’s Google’s Rich Miner, quoted in C|Net “One of our clear goals was to find a way and have a platform (to) deliver Google services, Google content, and Google search into those markets, and the mobile phone is going to clearly become much more of a development platform.” This will help Google “get our brand out there” (on to mobile phones).
Finally, I don’t know how a handset manufacturer would actually benefit from this. Free community WiFi access is looking very much like last year’s bad idea for a business model. That means people will still need to sign-up to get access to wireless spectrum from a telco carrier.
Is Google simply “remaindering” some technology which it had planned to use if it could pursuade the US Government to give wireless spectrum away for free (which it conclusively failed to do earlier this year)? It certainly seems to have got the financial analysts all excited - and stoking the Google share price.
Are the “Open Handset Alliance” members (Motorola, China’s HTC, Qualcomm, etc) just hyperventilating about what the iPhone could do to them? Nokia’s not a member, but then it has already got it’s excellent Nokia Nseries phones out there.
Does Google want to be real sure it gets an eleven-figure advertising revenue stream going on mobile devices?
Or is it that I simply don’t get it?