No-one that we have noticed has yet said that the Google announcement of the Nexus phone is dumb, so let us be the first. It is dumb.
It’s not that companies like Google cannot screw up without it being terminal, they can, and normally they can put the ship right, but we would love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where they talked themselves into the hardware business.
If we had to guess we’d say that this was all about pushing the ‘Google way,’ of doing things. We know it can cost around $300 million (so says Nokia) to launch a new handset range. Google can certainly afford that, and we have no knowledge of the terms between itself and HTC, which actually built the thing, but we doubt very much that it could have come close to that. The device is an iPhone clone, using existing HTC designs and components.
The Nexus One is a thin, 11.5mm thick device with a 3.7-inch AMOLED display, offering HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 and GPS radios, with a 5-megapixel camera, compass, 3.5mm headphone jack, noise reduction for voice calls, a 4Gb microSD card expandable to 32Gb, and plenty of sensors, including those for light and proximity, plus an accelerometer and a multicolor LED backlit trackball. As we said, an Android clone of the iPhone.
Google hopes to relegate carriers to the dreaded bitpipe role, and putting its own brand and retail outlet center stage selling the device from its web portal (is that setting up as a rival to Amazon?) unlocked for $530, or with carrier plans at around $180 a month. T-Mobile USA and Verizon will be first in the US, Vodafone in much of Europe, with these carriers’ plans available in ‘Spring 2010’.
The cellco will merely provide the connection, losing out almost entirely on branding and customer relationship, and bringing handset purchase close to the PC model.
We don’t think Google can seriously want to create profit directly from the hardware, and we assume that all it wanted was a willing hardware vendor to take its ideas on trust and produce a Google integrated software experience, so that consumers can vote with their checkbooks and demonstrate their preference for every Google app possible built into the spec, rather than allowing companies like Motorola to layer on their own user interfaces through things like Motoblur.
This amounts to Apple jealousy. Apple actually commits its own cash to purchase components and manage device designs itself, but it was not always that way. Apple designed the ROKR with Motorola in 2005 and the result was a terribly device which didn’t connect to iTunes and only held 100 songs.
Apple decided its knew best what it wanted to create, went and designed the iPhone and the rest is history. So while it is tempting to say that Google doesn’t know what’s best for consumers on handsets, and that it should listen to its hardware partners, that’s hard to back up when you have the haunting example of the first ROKR and the subsequent iPhone, perhaps Apple did know best, so why no Google.
So why is the move dumb? Google has effectively, publicly spanked its other hardware partners, saying that a Google UI is the right way to go ‘ so there. It even had the temerity to invite poor Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola handsets onto the launch platform, who is NOT offering a similar experience, and who lost the deal to build this phone to HTC, and who did have access to the latest version of Android ahead of all the other handset companies, in its building of Droid, but which has now lost that privilege to HTC (now using version 2.1).
It must have felt to Jha, akin to being the first PC maker that signed up for Windows back in the 80s, who later realized that it now had no plan B, and no way out of Windows, just as every other company could now share in his pioneering work.
But while Motorola has nowhere else but Android to go (having pre-Jha flirted with every mobile operating system on the planet and then rejected them), other handset vendors watching this display will be wary and unlikely to want to throw themselves on the bandwagon, that’s why it is stupid.
HTC has a passion for Windows as its plan B, Sony Ericsson has Windows, Symbian and some of its own strong UI brands, while Nokia has promised that it just won’t go down the Android route come what may. The companies that Google needs to curry favor with, the rest of the market, ZTE and Huawei being fine examples, will just be put off by this move.
Although we’re fairly sure that Google can prevent this being seen as a war of its design ideas over all of its partners, but if even some of that rubs off on the mobile community, to the extent that it is just a little more wary, it will do more harm than good, at the cost of shipping just a few million phones. And where do the owners of those phones go if Google decides belatedly that it no longer wants to be in the hardware specifying business? HTC will offer them upgrades to whatever it is doing, but it’s hardly the caring, sharing open world that Apple offers consumers.
This really should have been a battle for the hearts and minds of developers, and goodness knows, some of them have found that Apple is not as open or caring to developers, so there were some hearts and minds at stake. In which case Google perhaps should be thinking of opening its core apps (like Google Mail and YouTube and Wave) to the developer world so that they can make them look very DIFFERENT from one another, not be force to make them the same.
Of course this is the complete opposite on any tablet that the world comes out with, except of course one from Apple, and the entire smartbook industry may hinge on Chrome actually offering developers a common experience to work with on a smartbook, which would not have been there with 15 different varieties of Linux. A smartbook might suffer from not having enough apps on it unless Google does its thing and creates applications that work just as well on Chrome as in the cloud.
So effectively Google is providing a modern day ‘Windows’ for these communities. On the handset they (developers, handset makers) are wary of anything that might usurp their decision making on a phone. On a new type of device like a smartbook they (developers, smartbook makers) are happy to go along with anything that allows them to stop working with Windows, and yet provide comfort to the consumer that the devices will not be short of function.
Anyway we think the launch of the Nexus One is seriously dumb, but it still may achieve Google’s aims, of unifying the look and feel and function of Android handsets, even if it costs some considerable eco-system goodwill along the way.