Introducing Android
A lot of people are absolutely dependent on Google to find things on the web. And a lot of businesses are absolutely dependent on Google to advertise their products and services. So Google is the Internet gatekeeper of sorts. This has made Google very powerful and very rich.
After succeeding wildly in search and online advertising, Google came out with Gmail, Google Earth, Google Docs, Google News, Google Desktop, and lots of other interesting stuff. However it’s obvious that Google’s revenue comes almost exclusively from AdWords. Google seems to be riding on this huge revenue stream and jumping into other areas although the payoff is not very clear.
Google now wants to continue this trend in an industry outside that of computer software: mobile phones. Earlier this month, Google and some other key industry players formed the Open Handset Alliance and unveiled Android, an open source mobile phone platform. This certainly pits Google head-to-head against Microsoft. The situation is somewhat like Windows vs. Linux in the PC and server market: a proprietary operating system and an open source one jostling for market share and mindshare.
Although Linux is very much cheaper (or even zero-cost) compared to Windows, people are still willing to pay for the latter, partly because of familiarity, but mostly because of Excel, Word and other popular applications that run only on Windows. Thus in the PC market people are locked in to Windows. But no such lock-in exists in the mobile phone industry: I know of no compelling application that runs exclusively on Windows Mobile.
That said, the analogy between the PC market and the mobile phone market isn’t completely straightforward, as people can choose the operating system to install on their PCs, but not on their mobile phones. From the consumer’s point of view, given that there isn’t much difference between mobile platforms, the decision to buy a phone would be based much more on its physical design than its software.
Unless, of course, Android would be so compelling that it would override people’s preference for, say, Sony Ericsson over Nokia. Then manufacturers would be forced to install Android to satisfy customer demand.
Google is actually trying to do what Microsoft did: make it very easy for developers to build applications on its operating system, and hopefully a killer app would emerge that would make Android the no-brainer choice of the mainstream.
Even if Google succeeds in doing this, what would it gain? Google envisions a future in which people browse through the web as much on their mobile phones as they do on their computers. And how to browse through the web? Using the Google search engine, of course.
All this just to get people use more of the web browser on their phones? Google is hoping that someone would develop a web browser for Android that would be very much better than IE on Windows Mobile. That’s the stated intention, anyway. In the end, I think this is just Google being Google: a bunch of clever engineers having mountains of money and doing cool stuff just because they can.
Comments: