Google Nexus One
Following
yesterday’s Google Nexus One launch, based on the reading habits of most people, who scan texts and read in an ‘F’ form, most people would have missed the following insights which are at the very end of the articles:
From Tim O’Reilly, who noticed and amplified the buzz around Web 2.0 four years ago:
Picasa and iPhoto both sport image recognition, but Apple has to train its algorithms on sample data sets, while Google gets to train Picasa on billions of user images. As Peter Norvig, Google’s chief scientist, once said to me, “We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.” Collective intelligence is the secret sauce of Web 2.0, and the future of all computing, and by locking user data into individual devices, Apple cuts itself off from this future. Rather than having MobileMe as a separate revenue add-on, Apple needs to make all of its applications web-connected by default, so that they can learn from all their users.
What we see then is a collision of paradigms, perhaps as profound as the transition between the character-based era of computing and the GUI based era of the Mac and Windows. We’re moving from the era in which the device is primary and the web is an add-on, to the era in which a device and its applications are fundamentally dependent on the internet operating system that provides location, speech recognition, image recognition, social network awareness, and other fundamental data services.
We’re in for an interesting ride. – Tim O’Reilly
Good to see Tim quote Peter Norvig, who is an expert in AI. However, I think Norvig understates one of Google’s keystone algorithms: Machine Learning.
From David Pogue (Pogue is wrong, the machine doesn’t lack a multi-touch screen – it’s software disabled, but Pogue has some insights too):
But at the start, at least, the results are a pair of head-scratchers. The Nexus One is an excellent app phone, fast and powerful but marred by some glitches and missing features — a worthy competitor to the Droid, if not the iPhone. The Google phone store is a neat, centralized place to buy phones, but so far, it offers zero advantages over buying a T-Mobile phone any other way.
Even so, you should root for the Google Store’s success, because the obnoxious policies and fees of the American cellphone companies have gotten out of control. Anything with even a fighting chance of putting power and choice back in your hands is cause for celebration.- David Pogue
From Jon Stokes, comes a highly insightful take on how this disrupts the existing status quo that the marriage of carrier-subsidized handsets creates relative to telecommunications quality:
Right now, with specific phone models available only on specific carriers, consumers must pick a carrier and phone combination. Many consumers actually pick a phone first, and then pick their carrier based on it (witness the mass customer defection to AT&T when the iPhone was announced). If you want to keep using that phone, you have to keep using that carrier. If you want to switch phones without incurring a huge early termination fee (ETF), then you’re limited to the selection that your carrier offers in your area.
This is bad for consumers, but it’s great for carriers. Carriers don’t have to compete solely on network quality; rather, they compete based on a combination of network quality and phone selection. And because they compete partly (mostly?) on phone selection, their incentives are twofold:
They want to offer the largest number of attractive, leading-edge phones in order to attract a user base, and
They want to wring the most money out of that user base for the lowest possible cost.
Incentive number 2 is why wireless networks have performance issues, and why AT&T’s network gets more complaints than all others. Call it the “iPhone curse,” after the “resource curse” that seems to leave oil-rich nations mired in petty tyranny. Because AT&T has ensnared—and locked in—legions of consumers with the iPhone, the company’s incentive is to minimize their infrastructure spending so that they can maximize per-user profits. AT&T also has a motive to nickel-and-dime you to death, because it has you locked in with that amazing phone and its accompanying ETF.
In sum, as long as Apple’s red-hot iPhone keeps new customers coming to AT&T and keeps existing customers around in spite of the poor service quality, the carrier has little incentive to actually improve its network, and every incentive to cram as many iPhone users as possible onto each cell tower.
If Google’s carrier-independent store succeeds spectacularly, it could break the curse. If the idea behind it succeeds, that could break the curse as well. Wouldn’t it be great if Apple ran a similarly carrier-independent iPhone store, or Nokia did the same with its smartphone lineup? I, for one, want to live in a world where a carrier competes for my business by being cheaper and faster than the next guy, and not because it has a phone I want. That’s why I’m rooting for Google’s store idea to catch on, regardless of what the Nexus One kills or doesn’t kill.
Other interesting articles out yesterday and today which talk about mobile telecom industry disruption from Google, which I foretold in 2007 myself:
The Google Phone’s Disruptive Potential
Google’s biggest phone move: disrupting carriers by selling direct to you
A week after my “Clash of the Titans – Google vs Apple in 2010 and beyond”, The Financial Times has an article today by John Gapper, called “Google’s open battle with Apple”, which delves into how open or closed each company is.
One thing both Apple and Google have learned is that a solely proprietary strategy has flaws, just as one of pure openness does. They compete by openly expanding their reach while staying partly closed.
So take with a pinch of salt all manifestos about complete openness. Any company that is as valuable as Google is wilier than that. – John Gapper
The thing is, in reality, it has always been true to compete aggressively around your core strengths in business. The fact that Google highly leverages open-source contributions bi-directionally gives it an optimizing edge that Apple does not have in the long-term.
In other news, Apple ditches Intel for Qualcomm’s SnapDragon platform (update: actually, this links, says it’s NOT a SnapDragon), which already powers the Nexus One. Big win for Qualcomm, but also for ARM…
Additional good news for ARM: Marvell shows the first quad-core ARM-powered chip (Fortune/GigaOM).
This does not bode well for Intel, which already had troubles launching the Larrabee chip, but also has a few lawsuits to contend with, including the notion of making its compiler work well only on its own chips.
Bloomberg has a good article on the chip wars today and “How Intel is vulnerable now as people shift to mobile phones to surf”.
Why Google trumps Microsoft on the Web, even if Microsoft buys Yahoo.
Scott Karp, a professional blogger, has a good explanation: “Google is a web-native company”.
The Wallstrip Edge – Howard Linzon
Substitute MS for Apple above?
2010 is turning out every bit as exciting as I thought it would be.
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