Little can save Google and Nokia from mobile failure
If you look at the history of computing, very few companies manage to resurrect falling fortunes to lead their respective markets. Does this mean that once down, a company should resign itself to being out?
Apple is a famous example of a come-from-behind victory, but also a poor one: while it wins plaudits for its sexy MacBook Pro laptops, it still commands less than 10 percent of the personal computer market. Good, but not great.
In browsers, Firefox was left for dead years ago, only to get a new life and 22 percent market share. But Mozilla executive Mitchell Baker is quick to call Firefox's resurgence against Microsoft an "anomaly."
Few companies or products challenge an incumbent, at least not on its own turf. Disruption is required to displace an incumbent, following Clayton Christensen's thinking in "The Innovator's Dilemma."
Laughing all the way to the bank...
All of which makes me doubt Google's efforts to beat Apple in smartphones, and suggests Nokia and Motorola aren't going to fare much better. They simply aren't disruptive enough.
Nokia, for its part, made a big gamble open-sourcing Symbian after years of nurturing it as proprietary software to run mobile devices. The company has now discarded Symbian for its foray into Netbooks by partnering with Microsoft, a move that exacerbates its weak-kneed decision to bolster its mobile strategy with Microsoft Office. Nokia's approach leaves pundits like Joel West wondering "how Nokia will have an advantage on scale, innovation, features, branding or distribution over existing netbook makers," not to mention traditional mobile and laptop makers.
Disruption through Windows or Office? Unlikely.
Microsoft compounds the error by playing up its more expensive application for Windows Marketplace for Mobile, a strategy doomed to fail. Microsoft is playing to the developers' wish to make more money per customer, but if those customers prefer the iPhone, who cares how much Microsoft lets developers charge?
It's not just Microsoft and its crowd that are screwing up. Open source has also failed to offer a disruptive panacea. Motorola is betting big on the Google Android platform, but thus far has little to show for it.
Google, for its part, has attempted to disrupt Apple's iPhone in its apparent area of weakness: its closed nature. Google open-sourced the Android platform and invited the world of third-party developers to flock to it.
They never came.
As Slate's Farhoo Manjoo writes, "Even though it's far friendlier to developers, Android has failed to attract anywhere near the number of apps now clogging the iPhone." Android may be open, but it's not cool, and "cool" is where customers and, hence, developers are.
Which leaves me with my original question: if a vendor finds itself playing catch up, should it even bother running the race? In response I'd suggest that unless a vendor is willing to commit significant resources to a disruptive strategy, it might as well give up.
Of the companies mentioned above, only Google has a disruptive strategy, but it isn't spending nearly enough resources to tackle Apple's iPhone. Until it does, it will lose, open source or not. As for the others, neither Microsoft nor open source will save them, as they lack even a hint of disruption in their game plans.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
When did this change? In the 80's, we used to disrupt the market leader by ganging up: numbers 2 through 5 (or 10) write standards, clever camouflage for "not like #1", and then all brag about being standard. And then #2 would eat #3 a few times, and voilà! A new #1! It seemed to work. For a time, anyway.
I hear a lot of fuzz about the iPhone being closed but most consumers will not even notice that it's closed and won't even understand what it means. You can tell a consumer it means they can't run the apps they want, but the reality is that the App Store has all the apps they really want. The only way a consumer would understand is if Android had a killer app that wasn't available for iPhone and there are no such apps that are of real interest to consumers.
Well, I had a iPhone and I liked it, but couldn't get over the lack of a physical keyboard so decided to give the G1 a whirl. And what a pleasant surprise! It lacks polish and the hardware is weak (especially the battery life), but it's fast (yes fast), rock solid (in the last 9 months has not frozen or crashed on me) - I would reboot the iphone about 3-4 times a week. The syncing between the phone and the Google cloud is flawless. I never had my contacts in GMail. But it works better than any syncing on all me previous smart phones (I have never used a blackberry - maybe that's as good or better).
But the biggest surprise are the apps. On the whole, the apps on the Android, all though not as polished as the ones on the iPhone, are better and more innovative than the ones on the iPhone. Just take a look at Google Voice and you will get an idea of the kind of apps that are available on the Android. I'm mentioning Google Voice only because there should be plenty of links around now for you to get an idea of the kind of really useful apps on the Android. Even the useless ones like a metal detector app is more innovative than the useless fart apps.
Like I said before to me the android phone is not a bad phone, it's all about perception that makes the iPhone better in peoples eyes.. Your G1 isn't faster than the iPod 3GS. So if I look at what you point out to be better nothing really beats the iPhone experience (perception). I use mobileme so the syncing argument has no extra value either for me.
Again I repeat that I don't think the iPhone is better or worse than Android. It's only perception that makes the iPhone a better choice.
i think with more phones will come more market share (people might even start to know what android is) and with more market share comes more developers, developers are already getting annoyed with apple and looking elsewhere due to their baffling approval process
i'll admit android got off to a rather slow start but I think now that companies have really had time to create good android phones we will start to see it pick up
but you are right about the cool factor, apple's got it and everyone else wants it. of course all it takes is some good advertising to make people start looking at the phones themselves instead of buying what's cool, well maybe some really good advertising
You've got Apple right where you want them -- just like Custer had the Indians at
Little Big Horn.
Just like the endless predictions about Linux taking over the desktop, Real Soon Now.
Ah, good luck with that. Don't quit your day job. Android already is a niche player.
Sunny Guy
Verizon was supposed to be a big Android player but press reports today Aug 26, 2009 say Verizon has no plans to attend the big Android press conference in Sept. Why is Verizon now distancing itself from a failing product?
Android seems relegated to the third and fourth choice cellular nets.
Why?
Everyone is producing hardware crap compared to iPhone luxury quality. And everyone with a special need now realizes if they 'want and App for that' you buy an iPhone. There is no killer app for any other phone that you can't find many variations on the iPhone.
I grabbed Google Voice only to realize that the iPhone VoiceMail was nicer to use. Even my OOMA phone system emails voicemail to the iPhone. Google Voice merely duplicates what I myself have already.
Now if you don't have an iPhone it might be a must have phone app but it brings little to the table if you already have it together.
Microsoft was more open and available on more hardware, not to mention cheaper.
Google/Android/Chrome is even more open and cheaper.
So why can't history repeat?
I agree with you, but they are open compared with Apple and hence one reason why they won the OS war.
They also gave away their development kit to get people building for Windows.
Microsoft in todays climate is a closed system. Compared to Apple however, they are more open. This was my point.
Apple is so closed that they support their own hardware most of the time. Seems to work for them though.
I think Google will win the day because of it's openness.
I agree that Microsoft isn't open, only when comparing it to something more closed.
This helped Microsoft to win the OS war.
Apple OS was tied to a specific platform and only they had the right to ship it.
Windows was the OS for all kinds of PCs.
But Google is much more open again. Even the OS is open, so they have a great chance of disupting the market and winning against Apple.
The fact that the hardware Windows runs on is open in no way makes MS more open than Apple. Windows always has been and still is closed. As a matter of fact OS X is much more open than Windows as the underpinnings to OS X is freely available. It is called FreeBSD.
Sunny Guy
http://developer.apple.com/Darwin/
http://developer.apple.com/opensource/
Will it be enough? I don't know, but the story isn't as simple as taking a snapshot at this point in time and declaring everything non-iphone dead in the water. That's asinine.
As for Android, its definitely not failing, since it has been quickly grabbing market share, and as it does so, it will continue to bring developers and high quality apps. As a developer, I know that it is hard to switch platforms but as the incentives increase, it will happen. The new Developers Challenge will bring hundreds of quality apps within the month(I believe they have to be released as free, but the $175,000 for 10 winners of each category is a good enough incentive for companies and devs to do this). Also there is a ton of Android phones planned for the holidays, both super powerful and budget safe(under $99) planned.
Now, I'm not hating on the iPhone, because its an awesome phone and has its right to its "throne", but its stupid to pretty much say that the whole phone market is wasting their time because there is no better phone than the iPhone...because that's pretty ridiculous. The market is...ehh, I wouldn't say balanced, but the competitive market is great for consumers and will push something bigger and badder than the iPhone(leading to a bigger and badder iPhone obviously), this will ultimately will bring the consumers a crop of choices in the future.
Comparing s/w monopolies with hardware monopolies is foolish. Additional copies of s/w is free , but an additional copy of iphone is not free. Distributing s/w is trivial, but distributing a real object requires a huge network.What differentiates Apple from the likes of Nokia, Samsung etc is exactly that. I will be surprised to see an apple store in a village of India . But there are already million stores selling Nokia and other phones in India.
When it comes to coolness, do not think the entire world is one herd . What is cool in US is not even heard of in emerging markets.
Come on Matt, come out of that well. you ain't seen nothing .
You raise an excellent point. As we traveled to Honduras and Guatemala, the use of cell phones is pervasive. A native pointed to a cell tower in Honduras and said, "The national flower." An indigenous woman, weaving on a backstrap loom stopped to chat on her cell phone!
Wireless infrastructure is far less costly and more easily deployed in developing countries.
That said, our Gringo Plan (the company's term, not ours!) was for cell only - no data. Is data coverage available? Coming?
If so, does Android offer benefits in such a huge market? So far, I haven't heard much about that.
The emerging markets are slow to adopt data plans because the technology is not yet there or there are regulatory hurdles or it is too expensive. and there is is a dearth of useful apps. But eventually these problems will be overcome. Apple always is touted as premium and cool. The poorer countries care about value not about premium or cool products .Networks operate on wafer thin margins. But the volume is huge. So the operators still making decent profits
e.g.
HTC, Samsung, Motorola & Sony Ericsson are launching Android phones. They all run the same apps, but the user experience is likely to be what the vendors will use to differentiate them.
- HTC: Sense UI
- Samsung: TouchFlow UI?
- Motorola: Blur UI
- Sony Ericsson: <name?> UI
In this new "open" environment, ANY smartphone vendor & OS has the potential to do well, if it delivers a user experience that really clicks with consumers.
-It's backed Google! Despite their moto, one the evilest corporations on the planet, second only to Microsoft. Not to mention all the other evil corporations involved in their Android Aliance.
-it's an open source operating system, so good guys like HTC can come and add multi touch, outlook-syncing, even native tethering etc... to it or whatever they want.
-It will be one so many networks and so many different types of phone at different prices, law of adverages dictates that it will gain massive market share.
-HTC has already improved the Android interface to a level beyond the iPhone with their latest phone.
-Lot's of people hate the iPhone because they have either never used one, or dislike Apple, or because they can't afford one.
-All the best iPhone Apps are getting ported to Android (Also RIM, Symbian, WinMo, which won't help Apple.)
-All the techs love Android, and that is who the end users go to for advice when they are deciding what smart phone they should buy.
-Finally, if Apple keep putting it's relationship with the phone networks over what it's customers want, even the most savy and suave marketing will be able to stop the flow of customers going over to Android.
As for the others:
-Win Mo is dead, RIP
-Symbian's always been the same and the reason I stopped buying Nokia
-RIM, my company tried to give me a Blackberry but wasn't even a bit surprised when I politely declined.
As for makers, Motorola, Nokia, and others would be well suited to learn that creating a separate operating system or overlay isn't worthwhile. In addition, HTC could really bump all this into hyper development by making hardware that require minimal manufacturing adjustments dependent on carrier/carrier-type. HTC missed out on getting some products (HTC HD) to the US market, and now it's playing catchup. It will need help catching up, and that help will come from Android, not a carrier.
To use this article examples - I'm sure a year or so after Firefox came out there was tons of naysayers as well. Time will tell, not this article.
- by Cincinnerdi August 26, 2009 7:01 PM PDT
- @Matt So, I was with you until you wrote:
- Like this Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (45 Comments)"Android may be open, but it's not cool, and "cool" is where customers and, hence, developers are."
Oh, how fickle "cool" is.
What's the cool restaurant in town? The cool band?
Be careful assuming customers will be loyal to a product that is sold based on fashion or style. American cars used to be sold that way.