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The Google Phone : Why Did Google Bother ?
Google aren’t short of money. The world isn’t short of mobile phones. So why have they put time and effort into creating the Nexus One ?
The media classify the Nexus One as an iPhone killer. There’s two problems with that. First, it lacks the killer app to make users drop the iPhone. There isn’t one really cool, useful thing we can do with the Nexus One but can’t do with the iPhone. Second, the iPhone is not a major player in the market. It has 17% market share. Even if Google takes most of this it leaves them as a bit-part player behind Nokia at 49%.
The real reason is revealed by looking at Google’s big product announcement of last year, the Chrome browser.
The world isn’t short of browsers, so there’s no clear need. Google give Chrome away for free, so will never maker money from it. It’s market share is tiny. Why did they bother ?
Because it raised the bar for all their competitors. Which makes the internet work better for all of us. Which means we spend more time using Google, clicking on Google’s ads, and making more money for Google.
This has worked superbly. Due to some impressive technical innovation Chrome runs programs ( javascript ) faster than other browsers. Microsoft were stung into action. They announced their next browser, Internet Explorer 9, would run javascript even faster.
Microsoft see Google as a major threat. Yet every day Google make millions of dollars from people seeing Google ads while using Microsoft Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows. Those Google ads will work even better in IE 9.
Google’s online Docs service is becoming a real threat to Microsoft’s money-spinning Office suite. IE9 will make Docs work even better. Isn’t that clever ?
Google are ambitious as well as clever. They don’t want their service – and ads – to be restricted to our desktop PCs. They want it to be ubiquitous, with us all the time and everywhere. For that to happen they need mobile phones to work better.
The iPhone was a great leap forward in usability. The Nexus One means Google have required Apple to make another leap forward if they want to stay ahead. Whatever that leap is – and I can’t wait to see it – it will make Google’s services yet more widely used.