Spilling the Beans
Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 9:57 pm
I recently traded my iPhone 3Gs for a Google Nexus One (temporarily), I am not going to review the handset, but instead give my perspective on why the current Android cooperative cannot cope with Apple’s successful iPhone.
The greatest difference between Google and Apple, is that Google strives to make great open products, and that Apple strives to make great consumer products. I am an avid user of many Google products, I prefer Gmail over MobileMe, and I believe that Google has a much better take on online services than Apple.
The interesting thing is that both companies are entering each others market, Apple is entering the cloud with the same mindset that led their hardware to success, and Google is entering the OS/Hardware scene with the ideals of openness that has benefitted the Mountain View company profoundly.
Even with many successful products, both companies have a hard time establishing themselves in the markets they recently entered.
My experience with an Android OS device can be boiled down to the lack of focus, there is no single Android experience, it is a fragmented platform that has a hard time finding it’s identity. Normally when i use a Google web-product I can sense the identity straight away, they are the company that made ‘open’ work, Gmail is a great example, any day I could dump all my emails to another provider, but I do not want to switch because Gmail is the best. The thing that made Gmail so great was not it’s openness alone, it was a focused team of Google engineers all working on one common goal, to make email better, and they did.
Android is a whole other story, even though Google leads the development of the Android OS, they cannot make radical decisions without hurting the Alliance, and the handset-companies use their time on customizing the Android OS, to differentiate themselves from their competitors, without committing most of their achievements back to the Alliance. Google is having a hard time, because none of their partners truly understand the two-way relationship in open source, and the handset companies could never dream of writing a significant line of code, that could lead a competitors device to success.
If the rest of the industry wants to beat Apple, they should truly join forces, and begin giving back to a great project Google has sat in motion, even tough Apple is big, and has a lot of talent, they would have to work really hard if all their competitors were developing in unison.
Open can work, Ubuntu is proof of that, and the reason Ubuntu works, is that they have focus and control of their product, as soon as users can sense focus in a product, the product will gain focus in the market.
Apple has focus, and they are still leading the smartphone pack, if Google want’s to catch-up, they need to take control and unify the Open Handset Alliance, without the fear of being evil.
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