Android, an idea whose time has come...and gone?

Once upon a time, Microsoft decimated Apple with a general purpose operating system and a separation of software from hardware. As the story goes, Microsoft's DOS won because it (either through hapless luck or strategic insight, depending on whom you believe) opened up its operating system and courted developers to become the standard for generic hardware.

Decades later, Google is hoping to do largely the same thing in the mobile market with its Android platform, but this time the platform is open source, not proprietary.

I'm not sure it matters. Not yet, anyway. For the near term, Apple's integrated platform will beat Google's open platform, just as it has been growing far beyond Microsoft's mobile growth rate.

In part this is because Google may lack the aesthetic touch that Apple has in spades, just as Microsoft does. Its newest update apparently is much better than earlier incarnations, but Android is still no iPhone killer.

In part it may be because Google's intended application market may well be too open. Google has been careful to avoid calling it an "App Store," not wanting to paint Android Market so narrowly.

Instead, developers will apparently be able to easily develop and deploy applications and other content. The real question is how Google and its licensees will restrict content: who wants to download spam and other craplets disguised as real applications?

Mostly, I believe it's because we're far too early into the mobile market for anything but a tightly integrated hardware/software solution to work. As Clayton Christensen suggests, integrated firms (i.e., those that control a complete product) win early on in markets. Only as markets mature do component manufacturers start to win out by developing their components more efficiently and quickly than integrated firms.

Do I think the mobile market can eventually mature similar to how the PC market has? Yes. But we're still years from this point. Meanwhile, the market is dramatically changing.

We're starting to see the PC market gel with the online world, making tight integration between hardware, software, and the web critical to success. Here, too, Apple is leading, and its ability to add one more integrated component - the mobile device - to the overall solution means that Apple may be outflanking Google, which has a strong foothold on the web but very little anywhere else.

In sum, I believe it will be Apple and Microsoft duking it out in mobile and using the desktop and web services to drive greater mobile market share. Google? Android won't be enough. Google needs a desktop strategy, and I've suggested that a Google Desktop (Linux under the hood, of course), may well be the road to getting there.

Until then, Android will be interesting but not dangerous.

[seo2seo]

You used to wax lyrical about the need for competition, especially open source. Now you have the Apple bug, suddenly everyone else can pack up and go home. Apple have certainly got the knack of catching consumer imagination, but step back and look at the big picture; an Apple monopoly of cuil devices just ain't gonna happen. Move on, nothing to see here ...

[1photojournalist]

I like your insight on computer subjects. I'd like to hear your take on a different subject. What's going to happen to newspapers? Nobody inside the business seems to be able to figure it out. Could you, an expert observer in another field, tell me?

[The_Decider]

In the grand scheme of things the iPhone is in a niche market.

[artistjoh]

On the contrary, the iPhone is just the leading edge product of a new class of MID. Someone else suggested here that Samsung, Nokia and others shouldn't be counted out. Sure their resources should bring them into play but so far all they are doing is trying to make phones that look like the iPhone. What they haven't realized is that the old fashioned dumb phone is on its way out the door, and that so called smart phones other than the iPhone will not be around in 5 years as major players unless they are able to understand the computer/internet aspect of the iPhone.

Microsoft has the expertise to get into this space if they rapidly evolve their mobile offering into a proper operating system with IE on the phone, but like Google, it will suffer from a lack of control over how device manufacturers implement their software. I tend to think that Android should do well but it is always difficult for a new player to make a difference without being extraordinary and early indications are that it won't stand out from the iPhone sufficiently to get the traction it needs, but it will contribute to the decline in market share likely to be experienced by most of the other players in the next 5 years.

Meanwhile the evolution of the iPhone is closely following that of the iPod, which was also seen as a niche player next to the established Sony Walkman and the recording industry but despite detractors claiming the iPod was relatively featureless, the public loved the hardware/software combo and we know what happened. This time round there are more viable competitors, but they all need to lift their game (including Android) if any of them want to be seriously duking it out with the iPhone in 5 or 6 years time.

[uncletoddy]

While you make some valid points, your logic escapes me. You said Microsoft trumped Apple because it opened up its operating system. Now you're saying Android isn't a worthy opponent precisely BECAUSE it has an open operating system? Hmm. While Apple has the upper hand and more years of experience in the mobile arena, that doesn't mean Android can't prove to be better. You sound like you work for Apple. Me thinks thou dost protest too much.
And have you seen the latest Android contest app winners? They blow away anything else out there. And are you serious when you say "I believe it will be Apple and Microsoft duking it out in mobile"? Have you USED the abysmal Windows Mobile operating system? Microsoft is about to be trumped by Android, if Android lives up to it's hype, that is. It will be Android and Apple duking it out. Microsoft is already a dinosaur in the mobile arena.

[jvcalero]

How could it have come and gone if it's just starting?

This is what happens when people are forced to write blogs...

[sachendray]

Well according to what you're saying, other mobile players like Nokia, Samsung have no place in the market. it's just between Apple and Microsoft. I kinda doubt this line of thought.

[reyesm]

Lets wait until android handsets are actually in the market place to say how they will compete. What are you basing your theory on saying that Windows Mobile will be the only worth competitor? Symbian has a superior mobile platform to Microsoft in every way, I can also guess that they shift more units that MS worldwide as well.

I am afraid that when Android is in the marketplace and the new look Nokia owned Symbian platform is up and running; Microsoft will not be in the race at all. Apple will never control the whole market because they are too proprietry - this will not cause their downfall but it will never allow them to completely dominate.

[youcangetholdofjules]

From the way you paint it all, you'd think Apple sold every phone on the planet.

They sell about 1%.

[rcd368]

can't see the front of your collar in your picture but i'm assuming you're wearing a mock turtle neck

[mailinglist11]

uhm why dont they just call it

http://www.MobileAppStore.net
or
http://windows.mobileappstore.net

Cheers,
Dean

[jrepenning]

Fascinating gloss on 1984, but it seems to me that the PC conquered market share primarily by "opening" (in some sense) the _hardware_, creating a roiling foment of competitive marketing around this or that audio subsystem, graphics card, memory expansion, internal disc drive, and all the rest -- in short, providing or fixing all the things that IBM left out; Microsoft was only the software to support the IRQs and drivers and eventually Control Panels to string it all together. Even today, this legacy of chaos is Microsoft's primary albatross, and my experience with "switchers" is that their primary discomfort is a twitchy sensation that the sales experience really ought to involve more decisions, more things that are somehow wrong or totally missing in the base package and need to be fixed with add-ons. In this, the modern heir of the DOS/Windows marketing inspiration is surely Eclipse, not Google or iPhone.

Given my very different gloss on 1984, I'm not sure I even follow what you're trying to say about Google. I think Android and Chrome are both trying to control the platform (open though their source may be, their market plans appear anything but), with a strong scent of encouraging the development of applications that won't run well on other platforms, and somehow edging the entrenched competitors out. That worked in 1984, partly because we knew no better way back then, and partly because hardware solutions have an inherent compatibility challenge (if the board doesn't fit the slot, you're kind of DIW....).

But this is not 1984: we do know better now, all these apps that Chrome seeks to host better must play in all popular browsers, and developers for smart phones need market saturation, too. And this is not hardware, either.

[wooby1987]

Android is here to stay, I think. "Clone phones" - Chinese manufactured cell phones, a throwback to the beigebox PCs that flooded the market in the 80s, are an emerging product. And Android is the new MSDOS. Here's more:

http://clonedroidphone.com/