The Open Road

Google Android adoption--both that which is publicly announced and that which is still under wraps--is amazing. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently declared that Android adoption is set to "explode." This is good news for Google, of course, as well as the wireless carriers and handset manufacturers that support Android.

It's also extremely good news for Funambol, the open-source mobile cloud sync company.

Even as the mobile telcos seek winning alternatives to the controlling grasp of Apple, that same industry is simultaneously enthusiastic and leery about Google: enthusiastic about the operating system, but leery about tying all of their customer data into Google's cloud services.

Enter Funambol, the open-source mobile cloud sync and push e-mail.

Funambol ensures mobile operators maintain control over customer data, rather than sacrificing it to Google. E-mail, social networking features, contact information, etc.: Funambol can sync it all, with the mobile operator and its end-customers retaining ownership.

The fact that Funambol is open source doesn't hurt. Not only does it nicely complement Google's open-source Android strategy, it allows mobile operators, handset manufacturers, software vendors, and others to tailor Funambol's Java software to suit their particular needs.

Small wonder, then, that ten of the top mobile companies use Funambol, a list that includes companies readers of this blog use every day...in just about any developed nation (and others beyond). Such customer traction is translating into greater than 100-percent sales growth every quarter.

Recession? What recession?

In fact, as Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco told me on Wednesday, it is the recession that has accelerated Android adoption and, by extension, Funambol's adoption. Mobile operators don't want to pay hefty royalties for Windows Mobile and need software that sets them apart in a crowded, competitive market.

If this sounds like a perfect storm for open-source Android, that's because it is. But it's also creating an exceptional opportunity for Funambol, and could well establish beachheads for a range of other open-source products that sit within the Android ecosystem.

The mobile-computing world is increasingly a two-horse race between Google and Apple, with Apple clearly in the lead but Google Android making up ground quickly. Microsoft and Symbian are also still in the game, but the ultimate winner will be the one that best appeals to consumers or developers.

Or both.

This struck home while reading Mark Sigal's analysis of the "inevitability" of Google Android. On his way to dismantling the idea that Google's victory is assured, Sigal stumbles into apparently divergent interest groups:

[U]nlike the PC, where "good enough" was the bar required to seize the market,...for most consumers, their mobile device of choice is a lifestyle decision, a personal, ever-present extension of themselves that is resident in a way that never existed before with the PC--a value proposition that Apple has completely run with on iPhone (and iPod before that).

Fundamentally, though, mobile is a platform play, a game that is largely won by securing the hearts and minds of developers, and for them, the expectation bar is now set pretty high, owing to the success of iPhone across so many domains....

If you're Google (or Microsoft or Symbian), then, who do you target? Developers or consumers?

It's a real question, as while both parties' interests ultimately converge (consumers want developers to make great applications so that those same consumers can pay the developers lots of money), the short-term interests of consumers (sexy product) and developers (ease and richness of development platform) don't necessarily go together.

Motorola RAZR? Sexy product, lame development platform. Windows Mobile? Arguably a solid development platform...with almost zero sex appeal for consumers.

This is why John Carroll is probably right to argue that Microsoft should reinvigorate its mobile strategy with an emphasis on .Net as a powerful way for developers to write powerful mobile applications, it's not going to be enough. Microsoft can port all the business applications it wants for Windows Mobile. It won't matter.

Consumers don't buy business applications. Not until after they've chosen a phone that meets their personal needs, first.

Yes, enterprises do try to dictate corporate standards with Blackberrys and dull Dell PCs heading the list. But in the fast-changing mobile market, you can't hope that consumers will be forced to use your software. You want them to want to do so.

This is why I believe Google has a good chance of taking a serious bite out of Apple, and Symbian and Microsoft do not. Symbian is too difficult an application development platform, as Gartner notes, and Microsoft...is boring.

Not that it needs to be. XBox certainly isn't, and actually helped Microsoft surpass Apple in a recent consumer survey focused on product innovation.

But not in mobile, or even in computers. Apple understands how to create wicked cool products that consumers want, which is why its Mac sales are projected to grow by 26 percent in 2010, right through the recession, and why its iPhone continues to thrive.

But Apple's Achilles heel could well be developers, which are reportedly tiring of Apple's apparently arbitrary application approval and updating process. If Google can continue to help handset manufacturers to achieve the "Wow factor," while simultaneously creating a more open, robust development platform, it just might be able to beat Apple at the game it started.

In other words, the winning mobile vendor will be the one that marries sex appeal for consumers with platform appeal for developers. Google is on course to deliver, but it probably needs to win big with consumers before it makes waves with developers.

In the battle of the open-source mobile platforms, developers have at least two choices: Google Android, which is open source but (relatively) closed development, or Symbian, which is open source...once it gets around to releasing the full source code.

Guess which one is winning?

Gartner expects Android to become the second-most popular mobile platform within the next few years as it continues to gobble up Symbian's declining market share.

But why?

Symbian has been dismissive of Google Android, as well as smaller upstarts like the LiMo Foundation, arguing that the latter is overly focused on middleware for wireless operators and the former is fake open source with more hype than substance.

All of which might be true, but the reality is that it seems to be working for Android. Google has been signing new handset manufacturers at a frenetic pace, while Symbian has been holding steady with Nokia...and that's about it.

Despite Symbian announcing new handsets, Google is actually shipping Android. There's a big difference between marketing and reality. Google Android offers the latter.

For all the buzz that Android gets from developers, its success owes more to handset manufacturers than to open-source developers. Handset manufacturers and wireless carriers are hungry for alternatives to surging Apple and declining Microsoft. And while others may not be seeing source code in copious amounts, handset manufacturers are apparently getting their fill.

More than this, though, Google gives them a safe, consumer-friendly brand. Symbian does not.

This is the reason Google Android is winning. It's not about developers--at least, not yet. Neither Symbian nor Android really offers developers open communities and open code.

No, the difference today is brand. Google has it. Symbian does not, and that's despite decade-long dominance of the mobile market.

Symbian still has a ways to go. It has a weak user interface (UI) that is supposed to get better, but that describes much that is wrong with Symbian today. Everything (source code, revamped UI, and resumption of market dominance) is always spoken of in the future tense.

Meanwhile, Google Android rolls on--not because it out open-sources Symbian, but rather because it out-executes it.

Despite Apple's tremendous success with the iPhone, we're still in the early innings of mobile adoption. As such, a strategy of "throwing-lots-of-things-against-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks" makes a lot of sense.

It's true of platforms like Google Android, but it's also true of applications.

Even on the iPhone, which reportedly drives $2.4 billion worth of applications in annual sales, very few application developers appear to be making much money. Zynga, creator of Farmville, is an exception, as BusinessWeek notes, doing more than $100 million in annual sales.

This isn't to suggest that developers should stop trying. Quite the opposite. Now is the time to try a range of applications to see what sells.

Google is following the same strategy with its Android platform. The company is happily promiscuous with its code, allowing and even encouraging fragmentation to see where the industry will take Android. Fragmentation enables handset manufacturers and others to find the best fit for Android in the market, rather than going the Apple route. ("If we build it, they will come.")

It's very possible, as Bill Weinberg notes, that such fragmentation and experimentation will result in Android getting greater play beyond mobile than it does in the smartphone market.

I suspect Google won't mind. As in other areas, it's using the broad-based, open-source approach to increase adoption of its services like Search, services which generate more than $22 billion each year.

It's an approach that works particularly well for a fast-follower: someone tracking the progress of an early market leader. An open-source strategy basically enables the industry to determine, by itself and for itself, what the market leader is missing and how to resolve the voids.

However, it's also a good way to generate developer interest and, hence, modifications and add-ons. Application developers might be well-served by open-sourcing their applications to encourage adoption and make their road maps a community affair.

There are over 4 billion mobile phones on the planet, with virtually no one outside of the wireless carriers and handset manufacturers making money from this extensive device reach. The market is ripe for software businesses, but first we need to experiment to discover what sells. Open source just might be able to help with that.

You can look at Google's growing market share in Android, its dominance in search, and elsewhere as signs that it's winning in its markets. But for me, the best indicator that Google is winning is the increasingly vitriolic attacks piled on it.

You can always spot a winner by the bull's-eye painted on it. No one bothers to diss a loser.

Or sue them. Red Bend Software has launched what appears to be a specious patent claim against Google, alleging that Google's Chrome browser violates its patent (6,546,552) by including the Courgette algorithm, which enables Google to push compressed software updates to the browser.

As Microsoft learned years ago, success breeds patent lawsuits. Microsoft rarely sues over intellectual property infringement, but has endured hundreds of patent lawsuits, nearly all of them ultimately found worthless.

But it's not just patent trolls that are on the scent. Symbian, the one-time leader in mobile phone operating systems, has gone on the offensive, claiming Google is "evil" and fear-mongering about what Google will do with consumer data gathered with its Android software.

Is this an indication that Symbian can't compete in the market and must instead resort to FUD?

Google may ultimately be able to get out of the Red Bend lawsuit cheaply, and it's unlikely that Symbian's noise will unduly distract it. It may not end up dominating mobile, for a variety of reasons, but it's going to be a significant competitor, just as it is in search and increasingly in enterprise computing.

After all, Google is innovating in Android, as CNET reports, and generally pushing the envelope on what's possible in computing: mobile, "desktop," and cloud/server. Importantly, open source is a central strategy in each of these areas, which may be one of the things that most riles the incumbent competitors in its markets.

For Google, the increasing vehemence of the attacks on it should signal that it's doing something right. In fact, many "somethings" right.

Apple has an app store, of course. So does Microsoft. Google has two, one for Android and now one for Wave. In fact, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't have an app store these days.

We're swimming in app stores. Or drowning.

I'm serious. At the Symbian conference in London on Tuesday, I attended a panel that was overrun with app stores. Nokia, Symbian, GetJar, Sony Ericsson, Handmark, and Handango were all promoting their respective app stores, each talking about how great theirs is.

They're probably right. They probably are all great. But how am I, as a lay consumer, going to figure out which one to use?

More particularly, how will developers decide which platforms to target?

After all, everyone wants to be a platform these days. Does that mean that no one is?

Developers may be spoiled for choice, but "choice" in this case may not be what they want. Developers need to feed their families and will follow the money. Money is more easily made when choice is manageable (which is a euphemism for "limited").

This means we'll see plenty of application developers remain with Apple (though it's debatable whether the iPhone is the land of milk and honey for anyone but Apple), but we'll also continue to see a stampede to Google Android.

At present, every other mobile platform is playing for third place, but this could change: Symbian, as a foundation, is in a good position to launch an effective challenge to both Apple and Google if it can get its marketing and execution right.

Outside of mobile, it's unclear what role app stores will play. It's nice that Google Wave is getting an app store, but it's just one more "forge" among many. Every vendor (my employer, included) seems to feel an irresistible urge to create a forge/app store where third-party developers can "add value" to their "platforms."

Do we really need these? Or do we need more general repositories like Google Code and SourceForge?

I wish I had a definitive answer. I'm just not sure that these competing app stores do anything more than appeal to vendor vanity, and they could end up causing customer confusion.

As a consumer, I don't want to have to think about sorting among competing app stores. I just want applications.

Presumably, if I use a Sony Ericsson phone, I'll automatically find myself within its app store (unless my wireless provider doesn't slot me into its app store first, that is). But if that's the case, what's the point of making a big deal over a glorified catalog of applications that work with my given device/software/etc.?

It strikes me that app stores, like the cloud, are simply a way to dress up old ideas. If they help to organize potential buyers and sellers of software, great. But I still think I'd prefer meta-repositories of applications, similar to SourceForge, than individual application repositories for every single device or piece of software that I happen to buy.

How about you?

Apparently, Qualcomm didn't get the memo. Open-source developers as a group tend to be hostile to patents, believing that they're detrimental to technology innovation.

But Qualcomm, a company devoted more than most to acquiring and prosecuting patents, announced Monday the launch of a wholly owned subsidiary called the Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) to focus on open-source development for mobile.

The patent king seeks to become the open-source king?

Maybe. Maybe not. The mission of QuIC signals an intent to blend the best of mobile open source with the best of Qualcomm's proprietary technology:

Open source and community-driven software development is becoming increasingly important to the wireless industry....Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm that brings together a dedicated group of engineers focused on this area of growing innovation. With the goal of investing greater resources into enabling and optimizing open source software with Qualcomm technology, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. works closely with the open source community to enable the faster advancement of the wireless industry as a whole.

It's a welcome sign, but as yet Qualcomm has demonstrated negligible involvement with any open-source community One of the cardinal rules for engaging with open-source development communities is to, well, engage with them.

Typically, this means writing and contributing code. Code is the coin of the open-source realm, and I'm unaware of much involvement from Qualcomm in this area.

So let me offer a suggested shortcut for Qualcomm: hire someone to educate you. Danese Cooper, formerly of Intel and Sun Microsystems and recently departed from Revolution Computing, could help to shake things up on Qualcomm's San Diego campus. And there are others.

In whichever way Qualcomm opts to do it, the company must engage with open-source communities through free code transfer in order to be taken seriously and to have a chance of influencing such communities.

For example, as noted in GigaOM, Qualcomm intends for QuIC to help it optimize its technology for Android, Chrome, Moblin, and other mobile open-source projects. Yet given that the company doesn't even show up in the list of top Linux contributors, how can we expect to see Qualcomm play a meaningful role in distributions like Android?

No one is going to give Qualcomm bonus points for creating a subsidiary to focus on open-source development, if little open-source code is actually contributed.

In this Qualcomm could learn a lesson from Adobe Systems, which despite maintaining a healthy business in proprietary software, is learning to engage productively with open-source communities, as highlighted in The H Online.

In sum, it is welcome that Qualcomm finally sees enlightened self-interest in leveraging open-source software for the good of its business. Now it just needs to learn to accelerate such benefits through real code contributions--and not simply nice-sounding business units.

Had Vizzini of "The Princess Bride" lived to relate a third "classic blunder" beyond land wars in Asia and competing with Sicilians, he might have urged start-ups to avoid hardware-dependent strategies. Hardware, after all, can be expensive to build and can't match software for ease (and cost) of distribution.

So, is hardware a bad idea for start-ups? Or are we just thinking about hardware in the wrong way?

Gadi Amit of NewDealDesign suggests that the hardware business, long shunned by Silicon Valley VCs for its costs and complexities, may be getting easier due to ready-made manufacturing capacity in China, which is driving down the cost of building hardware.

Open-source hardware could drop the price of development even further, as Om Malik recently wrote. Give away the designs for your hardware and let would-be customers build it themselves.

This is a particularly appealing strategy for companies that depend upon hardware to drive what are essentially software businesses. Apple builds its own hardware because it wants to control the complete consumer experience, but it could also enable third parties to build hardware that is optimized to run iTunes, OS X, and other Apple software.

Yet hardware could prove the undoing of Apple in smartphones, just as it did in the personal computer industry, when the pioneer Mac gave way to the relentless, ubiquitous Windows.

Sure, Apple's iPhone is currently blowing the competition out of the water. Google Android, however, poses a serious threat, given its ability to embrace multiple hardware vendors with a common platform. Were Google to extend this strategy with open-source hardware, too, the strategy could prove even more disruptive to Apple's current dominance.

Android's momentum is a sobering reminder to Apple that community can trump control.

This same strategy applies to others, too. What about TiVo? Or Sling Media? These are all companies that have built and distribute their own hardware, but really what they're providing is software or services. The hardware is simply there to enable consumer access to software-driven data or entertainment businesses.

So why not open source the hardware and, hopefully, accelerate adoption by lowering the cost of manufacture and distribution?

This is exactly what we're seeing happen in software, as companies race to open source complements to their core businesses. Intel with Linux, Google with Android, IBM with Linux/Apache/more, etc.

Can it work for hardware, too? I think so. But we're still waiting on someone to prove it.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

For years, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM have used Linux to lower the cost of their hardware and software-based solutions, while keeping profit margins fat and healthy. Google, ever the quick learner, is now doing the same with Android.

The mobile market will never be the same.

Just as Google and others are using open-source software to lower barriers to adoption of their proprietary cloud offerings, so, too, is Google using open source to reduce the cost of mobile computing in order to drive uptake of its proprietary search-related advertising business in mobile.

Google CFO Patrick Pichette said as much in Google's most recent earnings call:

If we move forward the adoption of these smartphones by having a lower cost infrastructure because it's open source...all the (mobile) searches...will happen so much faster.

Open source: it's all about peace, love...and capitalism.

However, Android is more than just a way to shave a few dollars off a phone's purchase price. Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation's executive director, declared recently that Linux offers "greater flexibility, freedom from lock-in, and lack of licensing costs."

He's right, but I'd argue that the "lock-in" argument is a bit of a throwaway line and the cost advantages are of secondary importance. The real value for would-be Android developers is its flexibility, which in turn helps to corral a community of interested participants.

Google Android's open-source license also encourages broad experimentation with the platform by a range of device manufacturers. Some handsets will be flops, but others, like Verizon's forthcoming Motorola-developed Droid, look likely to succeed.

Google can play the odds because, unlike Apple, it hasn't tied its fate to any one device. Instead, it has intentionally spread Android's risk--and chances of success--through its open-source license.

It's genius. Sheer genius.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems determined to revive Microsoft's stale desktop monopoly, as reported by The New York Times and, in mobile, is focused on toppling Apple's iPhone "momentum." But he probably should be more worried about Android as a long-term community play.

Mobile is the future, and that future is going to be heavily influenced by open source.

Linux has succeeded in servers precisely because a wide array of Microsoft competitors have converged on it as a way to club Microsoft. The same is happening in development tools (Eclipse), browsers (Firefox), Web servers (Apache), and more.

In Android, then, Microsoft isn't simply competing with Google. It's competing with the entire industry--or will be, soon enough.

Google, for its part, should continue to spearhead Android development, but must find ways to open Android further to outside involvement. Otherwise, it stands to lose out to open-source alternatives like Symbian if they do a better job at encouraging community uptake. Google really doesn't need to control the platform to succeed.

In fact, given that its revenue derives from proprietary services delivered on top of the Android platform, its best chance for success is to do whatever is necessary to further proliferate Android.

Android is powerful with Google behind it, but it would be much more so with Nokia, Palm, and others. As in the server war, such vendors may find it advantageous to abandon their "Unix" variants to combine behind Android.

That is the power of open source, and it's how Google has made such intelligent use of Android. It's not about freedom from lock-in; it's about freedom to demolish competitors and serve customers by shifting the rules of the game.