To beat Apple in mobile, Google is going to need more open-source developers. But it's also going to need more Google.
Take me to your leader(s), earthling
Such developers, however, also want more choice than Apple offers them. Somewhere in the resolution to that tension is a big market opportunity for Google, one that carriers and consumers are going to give it time to figure out.
Google's Android efforts have looked Apple-esque at times, as Linux Journal notes. This is a problem. Google may not have discovered "the evil room" on its Silicon Valley campus, but even a hint of "evil" from Google could send developers packing.
But Google is no Apple: its DNA meshes well with that of open-source developers', as Tom Foremski notes. The company really doesn't want to do evil.
Its dilemma, however, is that it may not be able to avoid some of the "evil" that upsets open-source developers. Like control. Control is critical to good software, something that the best proprietary and open-source software has long demonstrated. Linux, for example, depends upon Linus Torvalds serving his role as "benevolent dictator."
The difference is that it's easier for Linus Torvalds to be autocratic than Google. He's an individual. Google is a company.
Even so, Google isn't going to beat Apple at its own game (i.e., deathlike grip over all aspects of a product). To win, Google must marshal an external development community, one that doesn't like to be managed and, as Dan Lyons (aka "Fake Steve Jobs) points out, one for whom rebellion in the form of 'forking' is par for the course.
Google is therefore left with a strategy that depends upon diversity not wanting to be overly diverse.
This is a challenge, but also an opportunity.
If the company can learn to exercise Linus Torvalds-like control without appearing to dominate Android, the project will win. It certainly has a lot of people cheering for it. It also has growing experience that suggests it's learning to walk the fine line between community and control.
As CNET writes, "device makers see Android as their biggest hope to compete against Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion's BlackBerry devices in the smartphone market." Bingo. Carriers can't afford to cede all control to Apple and RIM, and consumers remain individualistic enough to demand devices that fit their needs, whether they're based in India or Canada or Armenia.
The world isn't going to abandon that diversity to uniformly converge on the iPhone. It's just not. There is no one handset to rule them all, Sauron-style.
And so long as it's not, developers will give Google leeway and time to figure out the optimal development model for Android.
While TechCrunch highlights technical problems with Android's handset support, this strikes me as a short-term, highly solvable problem. It's a relatively safe bet that Google will figure out ever easier ways to manage development across diverse devices, as others have done.
Volantis, for example, offers an open-source approach to manage Web development across an ever broadening array of mobile devices: 6,000 and counting. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to Volantis.)
Google could do the same. It has time. As ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn writes:
Google's cost structure gives it the power to be patient, something no other market player has. The Android bandwagon is built on this patience.
With over $4 billion in mobile advertising revenue that Coda Research Consultancy is projecting for 2015, it's worth it to Google to figure this out. I suspect that, like Red Hat's certified Linux, over time we'll see Google certify Android applications. There are more mobile devices than different servers and server architectures, but it's essentially the same problem.
Developers may find Google's control of Android irksome, but it's less burdensome than Apple's winner-take-all-and-we're-the-only-winner approach, and it's worth it to see device compatibility issues dissipate.
My friend and one-time colleague, Mark Watson, CEO of mobile open-source company Volantis, pens a cogent analysis of the mobile content industry, and what prevents it from becoming the gargantuan market it has long been predicted to become. Watson suggests that "fragmentation may be the very thing that is inhibiting the ability to meet market expectations for growth and proliferation of mobile content and services," and suggests that open source may offer a remedy for this problem:
...[I]t's not possible for content providers to just put a mobile web application "out there" and see the immediate uptake that they'd expect on the wider internet. Instead, they need access to the right enabling technology to reach the mass market -- development tools and runtime software that can automatically overcome fragmentation issues, without passing the burden of device knowledge to the developer.
To date, the proprietary license models surrounding such software have meant that this all-important access has been limited or even non-existent for many smaller developers and content providers. And, without ubiquitous access, the growth of the mobile internet industry as a whole has been held back. In the traditional internet environment, access has been provided through open source software models. So why couldn't the same principle be applied to mobile?
This is a perspective I hadn't considered before, but it strikes me as true. The Web has flourished in large part because it is an exceptionally open platform, one built upon open source and open standards. The mobile Web? It is precisely the opposite: walled garden, closed standards, and closed source.
Suddenly, open source provides an answer. As vendors like Nokia look to open source to build the mobile Web, we may finally get the open, thriving mobile Web we've been pontificating about for far too long.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to Volantis.
Andy Rubin, Google's director of mobile platforms, reveals a great deal about Google's mobile strategy in a recent Reuters interview. One thing, in particular, caught my eye and suggests that Google's Android may succeed, and yet fail at the same time:
Rather than launch the new operating system with a range of devices from several handset makers and phone carriers, Rubin said Google chose to "put our blinders on" and make sure the first phones impress consumers....
Google has worked almost exclusively with Taiwan's High Tech Computer Corp and T-Mobile for the first Android phone, he said. "Google wanted to make sure that we had enough control over the hardware to make sure the software worked."...
This control - so important to Apple's iPhone in ensuring a seamless hardware-plus-software experience, may well mean that Android will work as advertised.
It does, however, also mean that Android's would-be open-source developers have far less flexibility than they might otherwise wish to exercise.
... Read moreVolantis just released its Mobility Server under the GPLv3 license, which should go a long way toward helping to grow Volantis' community further. As I wrote recently about Funambol and open-source mobile projects, it's hard to conceive how any proprietary software company can compete with open source in mobile.
It's not a question of software. Anyone can write that. Rather, it's a question of keeping pace with device proliferation, as OStatic suggests:
Volantis had already made its Mobility Server available as a free download in late 2007. By open sourcing it, the company is looking to the broad development community to help deliver web sites and applications aimed at mobile users for delivery on an ever-increasing range of mobile devices.
... Read more
There's been a flurry of excitement about open source in the mobile world in the past few weeks, what with Google's Open Handset Alliance and its associated Android software platform. In all the hype (some deserved, some not), people seem to have forgotten one Very Big Problem in mobile:
There is a huge array of different hardware and software specifications.
Google's Android solves the software specification problem (at least, for those phones that end up using it), but it does nothing to resolve the wider compatibility problem for mobile developers. Developing for the Android platform may make sense five years from now, but it's a losing (market) proposition until it gains widespread adoption.
Which is why Volantis' decision to open source its framework is such a positive thing for the mobile world:
... Read more
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