A few thoughts from a tumor surgeon

Good-enough and plenty: the future of Android

May 23, 2010 at 11:40 am Leave a comment

While I did not follow the events of the recent Google developer conference (“Google I/O”), apparently, a good part of the fireworks consisted of loud, public taunting of Apple and the iPhone.

Since much of this taunting came out of the mouths of Google senior executives, it was covered in the tech press and predictably stirred up comment threads all over the blogosphere. In truth, the schoolyard level of the rhetoric (see Kara Swisher) probably will not serve Google well in the long run. This is because Google needs its partners’ trust in order for them to continue as enablers, via their devices and services, in Google’s primary business of amassing massive stores of data against which to sell advertising.

In this heated spectacle, people seem to forget the obvious: that Android, despite the loud rhetoric, is actually competing against Microsoft not Apple. Check out Gruber’s recent post on I/O. Microsoft makes money through volume by licensing its OS cheaply to multiple hardware vendors. Google destroyed that marketplace by giving away the OS for free, while hand set makers are thrilled to get away from Microsoft.

Apple depends on producing consistently great products and charging a premium for it. They make a lot of money doing this and they do not need more 20-25% of the marketplace to be wildly successful. Apple is only interested in the top portion of the market. They already have an astonishing 90% of the market share for PCs costing more than $1000. But, if they stopped making great products, their business model disappears.

Android promises freedom for developers and hardware vendors and rapid iteration. This means that Android is fragmented (see Engadget) and handset incompatibilities will be detrimental to application development, enterprise adoption and user experience. But, these are not going to stop wide-spread adoption as Android only has to be good-enough to be accepted in the mass marketplace.

In the long run, as many have said, there will be more Android than iPhone devices – a lot more (see previous post). But, good-enough will never eliminate great (and vice-versa).

Entry filed under: comment. Tags: Android, apple, Google, iPhone.