Not that it matters, but I wrote this about a month ago and never published it. Then I read this article in the times today that reminded me about it. Unfortunately, it may seem a little less prophetic with all the new Droids out there, but hey, it is the thought that counts.Until recently, wireless providers, and cell phone manufacturers, were spending too much money into their respective operating systems with the hope that they could lock you into their services (I'm looking at you Verizon and your V-Cast crapola). By continuing to invest in proprietary software, the advance of mobile phones continued to stall. The problem with investing money into developing operating system code, is that developing code is not in their core business. As a result, and not surprisingly, the products continued to suck. To further the point (and I am being over simplistic), wireless providers provide you phone service and terrible customer service. Cell phone manufacturers, like HTC or Motorola, design and build cell phones. Nowhere, in either sector, should they have a business driver that says "Develop the best operating system for mobile phones."
So you - the brilliant reader - ask, who should develop a mobile operating system? The way I see it (read the stupid way), there are two major players that are in that market. First, and the most obvious, would be your software companies. It's what they do. However, lots of people make software, and it does not mean that they should be in the mobile market or would even be good at it (see Windows Mobile), but they are definitely players. The second group is advertisers. There are millions of people that are basically begging to have ads sent to them everywhere they go when they search for things like "nearest pizza shop", and more eyeballs on more ads equals more money. But without a decent phones, this is an untapped market.
Now what companies combine these two skills - advertising, and writing good software? Search engines you say? I say you are smart AND good looking. Go get yourself a cookie, I'll wait. Search engines have the most to gain/lose if millions of people can or cannot search from their mobile devices. Making sure people have any easy way to access the Internet on their mobile phones gives them a bigger customer base, which gives them a chance to sell more ads, which again equals more money. Enter the Goog and their new OS
Android. Google spearheading an open operating system for all wireless providers to use - that just so happens to integrate tightly with Google services - before any of their competitors can join the party, helps ensure that you, me, and your mother stay with the Goog forever. The only real question left was how do they get everyone (i.e. manufacturers, phone companies, and third party developers) to use it? The easiest way, is to let everyone to play, and to give it away, for free. Whoa, parts of that rhymed! Call Oprah, I need a book deal.
So what does this mean? It means that in the very near future,
everyone and your grandma is going to have an Android phone. Not necessarily because it is the best (it is too soon to tell), but because it makes the most sense. In
Wikinomics, Tapscott and Williams talk about how IBM has saved hundreds of millions of dollars by investing 100 million a year into Linux. What kind of crazy gorilla math is that? Here is the quick and dirty. Being in the operating system business was costing IBM tons of money. It was a battle they were not winning, and it was not the type of business they wanted they wanted to fight over anymore. Instead of fully investing in the OS wars, by investing a fraction of their operating system budget into Linux, IBM was able (and is still able) to take advantage of thousands of programmers' time and effort (read FREE WORK) that would cost them One Billion dollars (said in Dr. Evil's voice) to develop in house. So in essence, they get an enterprise quality operating system for 10 percent of what it would cost them to develop internally. The open source environment wins, and IBM wins.
A better example, also from Wikinomics, is the human gnome project and it comes from the most unlikely of sources. The Big Pharma companies were fighting over completing and patenting the human gnome code in silos. Meaning that tons of research was being duplicated, which was delaying the knowledge that was required to develop blockbuster drugs. Without a full understanding of the human body, it is harder to develop drugs for all kinds of diseases and ailments. Instead of continuing to fight that battle, forward thinking executives in Merck decided to open up their knowledge of the human genome to everyone because it was in their best interest to have a full understanding of the human body rather than have patents on certain genes. Since anyone could access this for free, and they didn't give themselves special priority access, the scientific community could make progress faster, their competitors could make progress faster, and they could get approval from the FDA faster since it was peer reviewed. That is not to say that there motivation was all butterflies and honey. There was obviously a bit of sabotage in their plan, now that anyone could participate in mapping the human gnome, everyone else's silos now would be less valuable. However, by having everyone collaborate together (universities, other Pharma companies, etc) they could get the base of their research at a fraction of the cost. By getting rid of a piece of business that wasn't vital to their business drivers (it wasn't creating drugs) Merck and the rest of the world wins.
Now, this exact situation is happening in the cell phone market. It makes sense for all phone companies and manufacturers to invest in the open source mobile operating system Android, because it benefits them all to have better phones, and like the IBM and Merck examples, they don't have to front the entire cost of developing software. By everyone putting in a fraction of the money that they would normally spend, they get to benefit from the Linux community (Android is a Linux based OS), they get to benefit from Google for help with design, building, and integration with Google services, and they get to benefit from third party developers who create the apps that everyone gets to buy and use. The sum of their participation greatly outweighs how much money they would have to spend, and the proprietary advantage that would be gained by creating the same product internally. In the end, it benefits everyone. The more people who have Internet friendly phones means more people that will buy data packages from phone companies. The more Internet friendly phones with data packages their are, the bigger the customer base for mobile searches becomes. Cell phone companies win, manufacturers win, and, most importantly, more people search with Google, which means of course that in the end Google wins.
Plus, every time you search with an Android phone it just resets the two year window in which
Google owns your soul.
Here is the link, and have a great weekend.
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