Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much' | Hacker News Reader

Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much'

theregister.co.uk

70 pointsbenpbenp94 comments

Since we've all been screwed by the mobile industry for the entirety of its existence, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel indignant towards Google for pissing off said industry. There are very few industries more arrogant and abusive than the telcos (at least in the US; I dunno about the UK), and if Google wants to take their place, I'm all for it. Instead of playing the consumer-screwing game better (like Apple did with the iPhone and its subsidized/locked-in model) Google is leaving those decisions up to the consumer and giving them a fair deal all around.

My impression is that Google looked at the existing phones and the way they were being sold (exclusive to specific carriers, and used to lock consumers in, just like all prior phones) and felt that it just wasn't doing the job the way they'd planned. Android had a reason for existing, and it was to break the logjam in the mobile industry so that Google could get on with the business of monetizing the hell out of mobile users. Since the old players decided to use Android to play by the old rules, Google simply reminded them of the way "open" is supposed to work. The play here is not for Google to become a traditional mobile device provider or to become a mobile service provider (though they'll touch on both). The play is to make the mobile web standard enough and good enough and pervasive enough to where Google can work their money-making magic there. Telcos are standing (aggressively) in the way of that, and the device makers remain willing partners in those plans.

So your argument, in a nutshell, is "two wrongs do indeed make a right"?

I fail to see the second wrong.

What did Google do? They built their own unlocked phone following the open reference platform that they helped create. And now they are trying to sell that phone on the open market.

How is this wrong?

The article was sortof hard to understand, but it sounds like they're saying Google mislead them somehow about their (lack of) plans to enter the market in certain ways. I'd say that could amount to breach of (spoken) contract, depending on the circumstances.

Other than that, I agree nobody has any justification for being pissed off by somebody cutting into "their" business by being more efficient.

It's not wrong for end-users. But that's not what's being discussed.

The wrong is to mobile device manufacturers and networks, who were presumably led to believe that they would not be competing directly with Google itself. If they knew now what they knew then, they would have been much less likely to utilize Android. They feel misled.

When competing directly with your partners, it can sometimes be challenging to keep them as partners. But this is nothing new for Google.

If the carriers truly feel slighted, what is to stop them from not certifying new Android phones, freezing Google out?

They still must see some value in Android, or they wouldn't all be tripping over themselves to get the Nexus One.

Fairly frequently, stories come up of a software vendor whose product was doing well until, one day, (Apple/Microsoft, depending on which OS it was for) comes out with their own bundled or free/cheap software which does the same thing. People often get upset at this potentially business-destroying transformation from "they provide my platform" to "they're my competition". Often there's a round of followup posts which mention the word "sharecropping" over and over, and explain that it's always a bad idea to be a sharecropper since this is how it often ends.

Google has essentially done the same thing -- gone from being "platform" to being "competitor" -- and phone manufacturers are, unsurprisingly, just as unhappy about it as software developers usually are.

The question I'm getting at, then, is why in the software case we often denounce the OS vendors and go on about "sharecropping" and how terrible it is to get caught in this situation, but here we're joyously celebrating Google for doing what is, basically, the same thing (and remember that as much as you may dislike the company which provides your phone service, they are not the company which designs and manufactures your phone handset, so "they deserved it because I hate Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/etc." is misplaced here).

I think the difference in perception comes from Google "screwing" large companies rather than small-to-medium sized ISVs. In fact, they're mostly improving things for small vendors and consumers (at least in the short term), which is why there's positive perception.

Because we're consumers here. Always remember that the economy exists to serve consumers. Hell, our regulators tend to forget.

I'd argue that Google's in the right here, and that we ought to remember it when, as software developers, we complain about some big new competitor moving into our market. The end goal of business is to serve consumers. If some bigger business can serve consumers better, that's the why we have competition in a market economy. Either compete, or get out of the way and find something else to do.

Except what the bigger business will actually be providing is just selling a cheap copies of the same product on razor thin margins.

The end goal of business is not to serve customers. It's to create more share holder value. If you can do that best by serving customers then so be it. If you can do it better by dirty tactics then don't think people will think twice about doing so.

Ugh, Milton Friedman started perpetuating that particular falsehood around 1970 and now everyone believes it, so much so that they expect to get raped up the ass by big corporations.

Why do we have an economy? It's because ordinary people need goods and services. If we didn't, we could all stop working and stop buying things and live happily ever after. Most of us aren't shareholders in any significant way; if we actually believed that businesses existed to serve shareholders, let's get rid of them!

The reason company officers should act as if they're beholden to shareholder value is because there's no economic check on their resource consumption otherwise. It's easy to satisfy consumers: simply take lots of money from shareholders or the government, and give it to the people (a la AllAdvantage.com and several other dot-coms). But that's not economically efficient: there's no check on the resources consumed, so there's no incentive to be efficient, and you eventually run out of money. The profit motive ensures that businesses consume as little as possible and produce as much as possible, so as long as they act as if their goal is to maximize shareholder value, they maximize efficiency throughout the economy.

But over time, acting in the best interest of shareholders has been confused with the goal of the company is the best interest of shareholders. The former is an instrumental goal; the latter is an inherent one. And the inherent goal of corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, it's to provide useful goods and services as economically as possible. Google gets this; most other companies today do not.

Well, my statement is based on what the actual US law is (CEO's are required by law to increase share holder value) and actual experience working at large companies. Large companies are inherently inefficient, not more efficient. There are inefficiencies everywhere and "cost cutting" measures usually don't have any useful effect.

Your theory, like communism, etc., sounds good on paper but I've never seen it work as described.

I actually agree with the law, I'm making a statement about cause and effect, and inherent vs. instrumental values. The law that requires CEOs to increase shareholder value is valuable because it leads companies to satisfy customer desires in the most efficient way possible. If it didn't lead companies to satisfy customer desires efficiently, it should be eliminated.

The problematic part is when you get that causation mixed up and argue that because CEOs are required by law to increase shareholder value, the government should help them, eg. by protecting them from competition. Because customers are best served by robust competition between businesses. Shareholder-value laws, antitrust laws, and intellectual property laws are all tools for this purpose. Just because CEOs should maximize shareholder value doesn't mean that government should pass laws that make it easier for them to maximize shareholder value, particularly if those laws are at the expense of consumers.

(And I realize that points have sorta become twisted around, such that it now seems like I'm arguing against myself up-thread. It's complicated. Basically, government should enforce level playing fields - it should make sure that products compete on their own merits, and not on the basis of their success in other fields. Cross-subsidization, like what Google does on a massive scale, is a tricky area. It's wrong if the company uses it to enter a market, dominate, and then jack up prices. But it's fine if the company uses it to enter a market, dominate, and then keep prices low.)

It's also worth remembering that Android is open source.

Theoretically, that levels the playing field. Microsoft often was accused of "cheating" in their product by using private APIs. Theoretically Google shouldn't be able to do this. I'd be interested in whether that's really the case.

More like: Upgrading to two wrongs may - in this case - make a right (for consumers).

No, my argument is that Google has done nothing wrong. They provided an Open Source OS that any phone maker could use (like Nokia/Symbian has done before), and when that failed to light a fire under the device makers and get them to do the right thing by their customers, Google stepped up and did the right thing by their customers (who overlap with the phone makers and telcos, but Google monetizes them differently...and historically treats them differently, as well).

I see a turf war between carriers (with Apple thrown in as a spoiler on one side) where the casualties are mostly innocent bystanders (us consumers). Google is sort of acting as a UN peacekeeping force, here. They might do some harm, as well, but their overall intent seems to be to knock some sense into the warring factions and make them stop treating consumers so badly. As with the UN, they are mostly powerless to fix the underlying issues, but they can at least set a good example of how to engage. I fear I might stretch the analogy a bit far if I go into any further depth or start mentioning war crimes, so I'll stop now.

But, I definitely do not see anything wrong with Google partnering closely with a handset maker (HTC) and producing a great phone with fair and open pricing and usable on most networks. I'm not sure what you believe is wrong with that...if there were some sort of contract or agreement in place to prevent Google from doing this, I'm sure the lawsuits would have already been announced. I'm, frankly, happy that Google has opted not to collude with telcos to keep the status quo (the way, say, Apple has done).

Everyone complains about the mobile industry but if I listed the industries that have or are currently screwing me mobile isn't even in the top 10.

Health-care, Insurance, Oil, Headphones, Government, Credit cards, Banking, Financial, Video Games, Cable then maybe mobile.

My mobile plan is one of the lowest monthly bills that I have based on amount of usage. To my knowledge it is one of the least subsidized industries. Are there issues? Sure. Could coverage be better? Sure. Would it be nice to have true consumption $/Mb pricing? Sure. Are they too locked down, Definitely, but the iPhone showed them what unlocking the phones to 3rd party developers can do.

I am not sure what another unlocked phone is going to do. The life-cycle of phones is shorter than the term of a mobile contract. So it really doesn't help me. If the phone allowed me auto-switch between AT&T and Verizon based on the best coverage and I paid Google on a $/Mb. That would be a game changer and push the mobile industry farther.

The Headphones industry is screwing you?

And specifically screwing you worse than the others you list later? I'm very curious to hear more about this...

Over the last two years, I have spent about $700 dollars (3x the cost of my iPhone) on 4 different pairs of in-ear headphones that have broken. Wires, connections, shocking my ears have all been part of the experience.

Now for the last week, I have been thinking I am going deaf because I need to turn everything to 11 just to hear it. Then I plugged in a different pair, and almost had my ear drums burst form the loudness.

I would suggest not buying headphones which, apparently, cost $175 a pair. I use a pair of very high-quality $99 bose in-ear buds; the point where the wire meets the phone in my pocket is a frequent point of failure, so I use a $14 headphone extension cable, which I replace every 4 months or so. I guess this is still pretty expensive but seems to be less than half the cost of what you're doing right now.

Oh, you mean that shocking-thing going on in my ears isn't supposed to be happening?

Not wanting to place product, but Grado make excellent headphones. iGrado are okay and reliably built, but the SR60's are the best. My ears have not suffered in over 9 years use. The only problem is the SR60's should go through an extension cable, and I even have to re-solder the headphone cable to the cans (the headphone speakers) cable every few months as the connection gets loose with friction.

[Note: These are not in-ear headphones]

4 pairs in 2 years? Are you chewing on the wires? Do you let your pets use them as toys? Do you regularly drench them in liquids (battery acid, maybe) ?

I can only conclude that you must work in the most hazardous of environments.

I've had pairs of Apple, Sennheiser, Shure, and Sony headphones over the last 10 years (ranging from $10 - $200 in price), and I can only think of maybe one pair that has died (an old pair of iPhone in-ears succumbed to sweat during long-distance running), and they've all seen well over 2 years of use each.

I find it interesting when people trash the government. In the US atleast, you have some control over it. If you are getting screwed by the government, you have various outlets to mobilize change and if you don't act on them it's no ones fault but your, since the government answers to it's shareholders: you.

I didn't vote this guy into office. But I did vote. And I knew going into it that either candidate would've screwed us over in his own way. Most of us have come to terms with the fact that all candidates are for bigger government, it's just whose pork barrels will be filled for the next 4-8 years.

You can be a candidate too. That's the the whole premise of democracy. Choose the right guy, and if the right guy ain't there you can step up.

Or you can keep whining and wait until someone else does it like the rest of us.

That'd be great, if America was a democracy.

//you have various outlets to mobilize change and if you don't act on them it's no ones fault but yours

I disagree. I should not need to mobilize change or act on it to be able to have certain things. Mobilizing change has a cost (time, effort, money etc) and I should not be forced to pay those costs for things an individual in a civilized society ought to be entitled to.

Freedom isn't free. The 'civilized' society just doesn't arrive naturally. People who want a civilized society have to actively work to maintain it.

What do you think tax is for? It pays for the military which defends your civilized society, your schools to make sure the next guy you hire isn't an idiot, and your police so that it's less likely you get mugged.

When you pay tax you're actively working to maintain your civilized society, but it's not enough. A government can enforce and execute but at the lowest level it still needs people like you with ideas to operate.

You have the right to bitch about your goverent only after you have exhausted all recourse.

You're only entitled to what you work for, and that includes defending it.

I'm sorry, but this just isn't well thought out. I do agree that people should be much more active in politics than they are (and much more educated on the subjects!), but the US has a hopelessly broken government. It will take a great deal more than activism to effect that.

If you were talking about an actual, direct democracy (e.g. Switzerland) then what you say would have some truth to it, but in the US? No.

Care to tell me why you listed banking, creditr cards and financial? Also, I think I can speak for most of us in saying that the communications industry as a whole is pretty much one big cartel. Cable, landline, long-distance, voip, mobile, ISPs... the lines are getting blurred more and more by the day, and none of them have our best interests in mind. Bandwidth caps on mobile data plans, ISPs and net neutrality all hearken back to the days of anti-competitive practices with phone billing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Health care, Big Pharm and insurance are indifferentiable, as well. It's all one big cash party with price fixing, tax write-offs, and lots of customer-screwing to go around. Government is getting tied up in there as well.

Sucks about your headphones. That's why I never spend more than $60 or so on a pair.

Screwing me is unacceptable, regardless of the relative degree. The mobile and telco industry is extremely consumer-hostile, and anyone that argues it isn't simply isn't paying attention (or is a shill for the industry). Google has never screwed me or tried to screw me. Maybe they will, someday, and maybe they have screwed others. But, in general, Google has done the right thing by me, and I believe the Nexus One is also an honest attempt to do right by me, as a mobile device consumer.

"...Google looked... the way they were being sold (exclusive to specific carriers, and used to lock consumers in, just like all prior phones) and felt that it just wasn't doing the job the way they'd planned. Android had a reason for existing, and it was to break the logjam in the mobile industry".

If that was their intention, they failed at it. The Nexus One costs about the same as the iPhone to produce, yet the unlocked version is sold by the the same price that what an unlocked iPhone would be. That means their are getting Apple like obscene margins.

No non-technical user in his sane mind would pay $330 more for an unlocked phone.

What they must do, if it is not obvious enough, is to get Amazon like margins and monetize the rest with a wave of new consumers hungry to look at ads.

The Nexus One costs about the same as the iPhone to produce, yet the unlocked version is sold by the the same price that what an unlocked iPhone would be.

You can't buy an unlocked iPhone from Apple in the US. You can buy a contract-free iPhone for $600, which is more than the Nexus One and still locked to AT&T. Yes you may be able to unlock the iPhone yourself, but that gets you in a constant cat-and-mouse game with Apple who considers you a criminal at that point.

No non-technical user in his sane mind would pay $330 more for an unlocked phone.

T-Mobile's plans are $20/month cheaper if you're not paying off a subsidized phone, so you'll more than recoup the cost difference of the unsubsidized N1 over two years.

That is why I said "would". I based my calculations on estimates.

http://www.isuppli.com/News/Pages/New-iPhone-Carries-173-BOM...

The Nexus One costs about the same as the iPhone to produce, yet the unlocked version is sold by the the same price that what an unlocked iPhone would be. That means their are getting Apple like obscene margins.

The point: You missed it.

The Nexus One is officially unlocked, and usable on just about any carrier. The carriers are the problem here, and breaking the hold they have over consumers in order to allow competition on price and quality is the goal. The Nexus One isn't magic. It doesn't fix the carriers; but it is one more thing to allow consumers to escape without having to break the EULA, hack their phone, possibly bricking it, etc. Apple is the enemy of this idea, not a friend, and the iPhone is among the best servants the old guard (well, the oldest guard, AT&T, anyway) has in their fight to maintain a stranglehold over consumers communications.

Sorry. I thought the cheaper N1 was locked and under a contract. But apparently only the later is true.

The article is kind-of trolling against Google really.

The idea that Googlenet means Google isn't respecting net neutrality is a sham. Other operators could create something like Googlenet for some internal purpose. They just extract rent from the public switching networking their operating.

Sure, Google is very much about making money, it's just it makes money providing value-added-services (search+advertising) rather than extracting rent on anything that travels through it's pipes.

It has the means to be the one who provides these value-add-services and it intends to keep those means. But the way it does this is increasing the quality and quantity of products - a good thing for us.

A story where Google is preventing someone else from providing more would get my attention.

So, I'm kind of torn here. We're watching Google ascend to a position where they can bend numerous markets to their whim, but they aren't really cheating the consumers at all. If anything, they've been great to us. Beyond that, as a college kid with an interest in distributed systems/networks, I should probably be angling to try to work there someday. But still, I'm scared, because it's hard to trust a company that big to do no evil.

Am I just being paranoid? (Not a rhetorical question)

No, not at all. Worse, Google is a public company, toiling under the requirement (by law no less) to ever increase share holder value. If Google found itself as the main (or sole) player in the cell market there would be a very obvious way to dramatically increase share holder value. And if they play the game properly they will also use this time of dominance to set up so many blocks to market entry that no one will be able to easily do anything about it.

I don't think that's true. Google's multi-class stock system makes them less subject to the immediate whims of the shareholders. Google's main strategy now is to make the internet better. Anything that improves the internet makes them more money. Cell phones are the internet. So if Google improves the cell phone marketplace, they make more money. Google taking advantage of a cell phone monopoly is unlikely if it takes away value from consumers.

Have you read some of the early writings of Bill Gates? It can be difficult to reconcile that with some of the things he did with his company. Maybe Google's main strategy today is to make the Internet better and maybe today providing less value to the customers goes against their goals, but I suspect they're going to exist for a long time. What would make them more money in 15 years when they've killed off every competitor in the space (they may not do this, but they could. They have the resources)?

You have very high expectations of people you don't know, and who wont remain in their current positions forever.

> Cell phones are the internet.

What?

In large parts of the world most people access the internet over their phone, not a computer. For example India.

Even here in the USA people are moving towards using their phone as a primary way to connect with services delivered over the internet.

Sure, I would have bought some statement like “For many people, their cell phones are the way they access the Internet”; but “cell phones are the Internet” seems bizarre.

I didn't know that about India! When I was last there, it was all still Internet cafés. (Well, it was 8 years ago, so I guess it's no surprise that a lot has changed—besides which, I get the impression that the current generation is a lot quicker than Americans to pick up on new tech trends as they become available.)

I meant what I said. I think it only sounds bizarre because you are thinking of the internet as something that is accessed rather than something that exists. Wikipedia defines the Internet as "a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide." Surely a cell phone is one of those interconnected computer networks.

> I think it only sounds bizarre because you are thinking of the internet as something that is accessed rather than something that exists.

Yes, you are mostly right. More precisely, I think of the Internet as consisting of the data on it rather than the machinery that pushes that data around, and this does explain most of why I didn't expect the wording of your comment. Still:

> Surely a cell phone is one of those interconnected computer networks.

Yes, I agree! However, it seems to me that that would be better expressed as kl4m did (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047752), possibly with ⊆ in place of ∈.

He means "Cell phones ∈ Internet"

I'm not sure that I buy that one, either. Perhaps “Cell phones ⊆ Internet-accessing devices” or, for whimsy, something like “Cell phone :: Person → Internet”?

Yes, thank you.

Until the next Google?

Until now every company has had a weakness. Namely, dominance in some other market could be used to undercut them on price. The way to battle such companies has been to undermine their dominant market, or use the same strategy with a different market. Advertising is so unquantifiable at the moment that you can't undermine Google's market by simply selling advertising more cheaply. You could try to make a better search, but at some point Google wont be so depending on search for their ad revenue.

The thing that is scary about Google is they have unlimited pockets. They can just continue throwing money away until they've taken over every market they care to. And then they can recoup those losses...

Substitute Google with Microsoft and the products with MS products (say, Windows and Office) and you would have a common doomsday monopoly prediction ca. 1998. You can probably do the same with IBM before MS, but I'm too young to know.

20 years from now you'll wonder what you were so afraid of. Google is in its golden age, but it won't last forever.

But MS had exactly the weakness I was talking about. If someone gives away their OS for free what will you do? Giving away advertising for free wont affect anything.

Presumably they have a weakness. As you say, it's hard to quantify what they're doing, but that just means we don't have an easy way to figure it out. It still has statistics, limits and numbers, even if only their accountants have a good handle on what those are.

Well, in this case no one has a handle on the numbers yet. If you don't advertise at all and you have zero customers, then you advertise with google and get 100 customers, then the value is easily quantifiable. But it's never that cut and dry. How much value is e.g. HP getting from google?

If you can't know what the actual value of the service is, how can you make decisions about who is cheaper? Is bing cheaper? Maybe, but what about after you consider the vastly decreased exposure? How much does that matter?

I still think the only way to beat google today is to make a better search engine. Tomorrow that wont work either.

A pretty good point against Google is their user support which isn't that good. I've never been in contact with them personally but I've read a fair amount of complaints. Especially with adwords it's hard to get a fair response from Google.

they aren't really cheating the consumers at all. If anything, they've been great to us

The thing is this: the relationship that exists between me and T-mobile is, I pay them money and they provide me with voice and data and BlackBerry services. Now I'm obviously just one individual, but I am fairly representative of a high-value subset of T-mobile's customer base and as a collective, T-mobile's interests are well aligned with our own. They aren't going to screw me because in doing so they'd screw us (e.g. all BB owners) and we'd migrate en-masse to Vodafone.

The relationship that exists between me and Google is that they provide me with free services so long as I and those like me engage in behaviors that are beneficial to their advertisers. It's difficult as an end user to get support from Google because they don't really care; they'd care only if their quality of customer service could affect my purchasing decisions with their advertisers. If people who couldn't get tech support from Google for their phones switched to Bing for search maybe they'd care, but I doubt anyone does that...

Not exactly. The relationship you have with T-mobile is that they have signed you to a contract that locks you in to their service. At every turn T-mobile's goal is to lock you in, and once you're locked in they don't care about you.

By contrast Google sets things up so that you can switch at any time, and they constantly have to keep you happy.

That's not really true, tho'. Come contract renewal time they are very accomodating. Or call them up and get through to Customer Retention and again, they'll bend over backwards.

But my point stands. T-mobile is interested in keeping me happy, over the long term. Google is interested in keeping its advertisers happy. Given the choice between you or I and them, it will always choose them. That's why it wants all your data, even if they don't sell it directly, it is to monetize it.

Well sure. They'll seem like they'll do anything for you. But if you look at the cold, hard numbers you'll realize that the average phone contract sums out to maybe $1-2k over its life, with a pretty hefty profit margin. Of course they're going to "bend over backwards" for you at contract time.

The used car salesman does the same thing. The rubes fall for the shtick nearly every time and the salesman laughs all the way to the bank.

Keep in mind that these are the same folks who markup a service that costs practically nothing to run to rates 4x higher than the cost of transmitting data from the Hubble space telescope.

Well, sure. Profit isn't a dirty word. But it is a mutual relationship in most cases, cash in return for goods or services. My relationship with Google is far murkier. I can't look at my account and see what is the cash equivalent I've paid them for Gmail this month - and make no mistake, if we weren't providing Google with something of cash value in return, we wouldn't be getting all these "free" services. What am I worth to Google as a "customer"? I've no idea. What level of service do they "owe" me? Well, none actually, there's no contract between us. That's a little disconcerting.

You are oversimplifying Google. Google's philosophy is that doing right by their users is always the best thing to do.

Remember, Google got where it is by doing what they think is right for users, not by doing what advertisers asked for. That philosophy is pretty deeply embedded in the corporate DNA. Humans being human that is sure to change over time, but I think it will take a long time. And until it does, I wouldn't worry about it much.

(Disclaimer, I started at Google about a week ago. This gives me both insight and a predictable amount of enthusiasm.)

Not true. T-Mobile is one of the only carriers (at least in the US) that offers month-to-month service. If you don't like them then you can just switch to a different carrier and pay no penalties other than what you've already paid for that month.

So far I've been very happy with my service, but if a cheaper US nationwide GSM operator came on the scene, you can bet I'm going to switch if T-Mobile doesn't drop their price to match.

How is it really different? If Google don't get you to use and keep using their service, they lose you as a product to sell to their advertising clientele. Users are still indirectly their revenue source.

> Users are still indirectly their revenue source.

It's not clear to me that that's enough. I think that a lot of the current state of the world can be explained by the inability of people—and companies are run by people, and, much as one would hope stupidity would experience destructive interference, it doesn't seem to do so—to pay attention to indirect effects of their actions.

(Maybe Google will avoid this trap—they have so far, emphasising discreet and inoffensive ads over the in-your-face ones that advertisers seem to prefer—but I wouldn't bet on it forever.)

Tech support is one thing but the more problematic thing is that they have an incentive to spy on us to increase value for their actual customers, the advertisers.

But I'm torn, because google also has an incentive to make content available for free, which also makes it available anonymously.

I can never tell how much of a given Register article is prescient contrarianism and how much is straight trolling.

Yeah, it's a little over the top. I don't like how articles like this always fail to put forward the theory that maybe Google did the N1 to avoid Windows Mobile's fate by creating an in-production reference platform that commits them to backwards compatibility. It probably won't prevent further fragmentation, but it's worth a shot.

Also, it's not Google's fault that the other Android devices suck ass.

Orlowski's articles are often blatant trolls, this one is way out there claiming that the mobile operators who've had us over barrels for so long should be felt sorry for because they can't break the net. Nobody is stopping them making a video on demand service, people are stopping them from making a video on demand that has priority and blocks others. And calling all the civil society groups that fought for net neutrality Google sockpuppets is a bit much.

He's siding with all the other players to be a troll but we side with Google not because we love them but because we don't want the carriers to be anything more than ISPs. They are simply too stupid to manage it, look at SMS data transfer still costing four times more than data transfer to the Hubble telescope. Whereas you have Google pushing open jabber chat protocols and then building Wave on top of them. Who do you trust, a bunch of dying lock-in mongers with a track record of squeezing everything they can out of you and the troll-jester Orlowski or Google which has a decent track record open sourcing most of their stuff and adding value?

As someone who has suffered iPhone lock-in and incredibly poor customer service (3G on my 3G iphone has never worked from day one and the carrier and Apple refused to do anything about it - even suggesting I "turn off 3G to abate the problem" WTF) I can't wait for unlocked no-contract Linux phones to become the norm and just wipe them all out. And I don't think Google cares about "the mobile industry" either, they can burn bridges there because that industry doesn't work as a block (there is no honour among thieves) and they can always find one to make the hardware for them.

> we side with Google not because we love them but because we don't want the carriers to be anything more than ISPs. They are simply too stupid to manage it...

Amen! For now, I trust Google because they've positioned themselves in such a way that they benefit from doing the right thing. The balance of incentives favours openness, because Google is in the best position to exploit open platforms to deliver their services. The rest of us benefit more or less incidentally.

I don't trust Google myself, but you bring up very good points.

Yes, exactly.

In addition to being a troll, Mr. Orlowski has a long-standing and irrational dislike of Google in particular, and while this is the most credible piece I've ever seen from him, everything he says about the company should be taken with huge heaping spoonfuls of salt.

In his typical M.O., he takes an initially rational argument (Google is competing with mobile operators it was previously partnering with, which is going to accelerate their transformation into dumb pipes) and then extrapolates to ridiculous conclusions (Google is secretly attempting to build its own private Internet and become the only ISP in the world).

Google is definitely a threat to mobile operators, but then the writing has been on the wall for their business model for a long time -- a disruptively cheap VoIP operator with a data-only handset is going to be the end of the archaic concept of "voice minutes" and thus their profits. It might be Google, or it might not, but it's going to be somebody.

Nothing says intelligent debate like righteous indignation :/ (referring to the register, not you)

The degree to which Google is "shaking up" the mobile industry has been vastly overstated by the media. I think this is mostly due to the crazy rumors that were flying before the launch (e.g. it was going to use SIP for calls, or that it would be massively subsidized/free even without a plan).

What Google actually offered with the N1 is not very revolutionary. Selling unlocked phones online isn't new. Nor is having phones that run on your choice of US carriers (hello, Blackberry).

Really, the only innovation here is at T-Mobile, which has calling plans that are a little bit cheaper each month if you bring your own phone instead of having them subsidize one.

How much the consumers have gotten screwed on the phones is peanuts compared to how much the consumers have gotten screwed on voice charges. Really, there is no such thing as circuit switched networks anymore, so there is no technical reason to charge people by the minute. Google, get Skype/Google Talk/whatever on there, let us buy flat fee data plans, and put the bastards out of business already.

Awww. Do the poor wittle cellphone manufacturers have their poor wittle feelings hurt? Here, have a blankie.

Really, I’m having trouble seeing what the complaint is behind all the bombast. The author doesn’t claim that Google is selling the phones at a loss or doing anything else that would raise an antitrust issue. Carriers can offer the Nexus alongside other manufacturers’ Android phones and, for that matter, the ten thousand other cellphone models that clog the market. Most consumers will choose among those models based on prices and features, not brand name. (Microsoft sells keyboards and mice under its own brand name, but they’ve hardly put the other keyboard and mouse manufacturers out of business.)

So where’s the problem? That competition might reduce the profit margins of cellphone manufacturers? From my side of the salesman’s counter, that’s anything but a problem.

My first thoughts as well. It's about time someone with actual clout gave the mobile phone cartel the shaft. Yes, it's a cartel, when you pay $.50 a text message off your plan with all carriers there's gotta be some price fixing behind the scenes.

Not sure having one mobile provider will result in a reduction of price. It's free now but you will pay later.

Yes but who really does that? Except when roaming. Even a basic plan will have like a thousand texts a month.

I pay for texts on a per-message basis. Single texts are a quarter or so and the smallest minimum text plan is about $5/mo. I don't send 20 texts in a month so I just forego the service altogether.

I still send and receive the occasional text but I don't care enough to pay for the package. It helps that I have a 5GB smartphone data plan.

The mobile providers are being pushed in to being dumb pipes essentially like ISPs and I'm supposed to feel sorry for them? How is this anything but good for consumers, and fair for the mobile industry?

I wouldn't even consider a third Google Android handset in the future. HTC (and others) are burning too many bridges not getting updates out the door fast enough. I can't even run most of Google's new Android first party apps on my phone because I'm stuck with Android 1.5 and Sprint/HTC won't commit to any time table on an update. "2010" is as specific as they want to get. Android 3.x may be out before I even get 2.x. Good work guys. Great end user experience. Maybe Google did some shady stuff here but the third party handset makers screwed themselves too.

I suspect that the motivation for an official 'Google Phone' is to provide at least one model that's guaranteed to get firmware updates in a timely fashion. With luck, it will pressure the other handset manufacturers to provide the same service.

So Apple gets attacked for not allowing their OS to run on non-Apple hw and Google gets attacked for allowing their OS to run on non-Google hardware? (I realize they're actually being criticized for now having their own device here, but just another perspective). I guess you could just not have your own hardware, since that's working so well for WinMo.

All another company needs to do is build a better phone and they'll have all the press again. Without Google's (free, by the way) OS, Motorola would be just about dead by now. And I don't think Sony Ericson or LG had some great mobile OS in the works either. Google may have single-handedly saved a half dozen companies from being eaten alive by Apple later this year when the AT&T exclusivity runs out and all we every hear is how Google is screwing over it's partners by having the gall to have an HTC phone Google branded and sold online.

Does anyone really believe the companies that were supposedly shafted were surprised when Google released their own phone? I knew the Google phone was in the works long before any of the other phones came out and I don't have connections at Google or telcos. I'd bet money the device manufacturers and the the telcos were well aware of the Google phone when they agreed to work with Android.

This guy doesn't understand the industry he's writing about.

Telcos benefit by not having the overhead of advertising and supporting phones. They make their money selling services not phones (hence the heavy subsidies.)

Manufacturers benefit by the popularity of the Android platform. It's easy to get people to switch to your hardware if they already know how the OS works and can use all their existing apps.

Well, there's two side to that. The fragmentation of the mobile industry is the problem that Android was built to solve. However, Google getting directly into the business of making and selling handsets means the playing field is no longer level. That was the author's point, at least before he went off the rails and started off-handedly claiming that global warming is a hoax.

Other Android phones are to Nexus One as Firefox is to Chrome.

If Google does the same thing as you do it doesn't mean it doesn't love you anymore. It still will cooperate with you and it still will pay you. It just wants to try out some things but they don't want to force you to try it for them.

It would be interesting to see a decent unsubsidized $100 Android device hit the market. This would be inexpensive enough where a consumer could buy the phone outright and choose a telco without a long-term contract.

What a ridiculous article with antagonistic points. Terrible writing too.

You have to take this article with a large grain of salt as Google's obvious target was not non-US mobile telecoms but US telecoms

And obviously caught in the middle is OEMs who attempted to do Mobile Telecoms bidding..

The other obvious target is China Mobile to derail their Ophone initiative

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