HTC’s Android handset: the little droid that can’t
// November 10th, 2008 // strategy
As fun to get to know as an early Linux install, for all the same reasons.
I’ve got no mobile clients at the moment but I’m a mobile geek so I’ve been watching with great interest to see what the market makes of the first handset to ship with Google’s Android mobile OS. I’m not surprised that it’s gotten a rave review by people who like to overclock their PC and a ho-hum review from people who just want something as easy to use as the iPhone but not from Apple. I’m surprised that Google and its partners really believe they can create an open architecture for mobile handsets that can compete with the seamless nature of the iPhone. I don’t think it can.
Everything that makes the iPhone such a revolutionary user experience depends on Apple’s ‘cathedral — its absolute control over hardware, operating system and applications. Even third-party applications are developed using Apple’s tools and marketed and delivered in a market tightly controlled by Apple.
Everything reviewers find disappointing about HTC’s first Android handset boils down to the difficulty in making a ‘bazaar’ product work – not controlling every aspect of the product and its software makes it harder design things that work smoothly.
Will the cathedral or the bazaar approach win out in the mobile handset market? Apple’s incredible success in the music player market suggests the cathedral is the model to adopt whenever you’re shipping high volumes of units to consumers who aren’t geeks – they just want something that works.
Google and its handset partners will probably garner a large and sustainable market of customers who like to take pride in their ability to configure, tweak and debug their Android handset, but that will always be a vastly smaller market than the number of people who just want to be delighted by how easy their phone is to use.
Android handsets will get better and better, but the capabilities will drift further apart over time, so that Android handsets will get better at specialist field applications – the sorts of things tablet PCs often do now — while the iPhone gets better at entertainment content and services.
People sometimes forget that Apple now owns a controlling stake in one of the biggest Hollywood studios, has very powerful relationships with what remains of the music industry, has a great set-top box (AppleTV), a robust delivery platform (iTunes) and is rapidly funding (presumably eventually to acquire) iPhone application developers.
Android may put price pressure on Apple, but we’ve seen with iPods how ready Apple is to crush competitors when it comes to price.
Could Google outmarket Apple? The word-of-mouth hype that created the Google behemoth was mostly an accident — byproduct of a bunch of people working really hard and keeping their heads down while the market watched with fascination. Google’s got no clue when it comes to marketing – how else to explain why they left their mobile platform with its original codename when they launched it? Is “Android” accessible? Cute? Sexy? Fun? Yeah, maybe if you like fiddling with code, but otherwise, probably not.
