Essential Raises $300M
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Not all of us are clumsy with our expensive and fragile possessions.
Then Microsoft went ahead and shot itself in the foot, hang himself from the ceiling, commit harakiri, burned down the house and then jumped down a bridge.
You already know how to make really really good phones, too. Maybe not quite as good as Samsung, but still, very very good.
What does Essential bring to the table? Market share? Design skills? I mean, aren't they contracting out the manufacturing to some low-cost company?
I don't know. If you were LG and felt you needed marketing and design skills, wouldn't you just make a deal with some super star, internationally known design firms (or someone) and add them to your team somehow?
Why buy a whole expensive outside company when, at best, they know a few more things about phones than you do?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin
His track record is amazing (Danger/Android).
I agree 100% with everything you have said but I'm willing to see where this goes based solely on his reputation.
Surely their is something more to this than just building a high end Android phone with a little privacy tech thrown in.
Let's not fool ourselves: Android gained momentum because it was what was there when Google needed it; it's not a particularly well engineered or cohesive system. Everything down to the very basics is rushed and haphazardly thrown together, and I cannot see any improvement (Kotlin is a smart move to exfiltrate from the legal corner Google has painted itself with Java-the-Language, but the fact that this came from a 3rd party is pretty telling).
Android is open, most good ideas come from the community. The fact that Google chose Kotlin over Go shows that there is very little politics in Android, the best technology often wins.
In what world is Go a realistic consideration in this discussion ? Android is built on top of a JVM - Go is a native language with no JVM access. Not to mention it has nothing to do with Go target domain.
Google already has an alternative mobile OS with Fuchsia and the front-end Flutter stack is built on their Dart language which can be viewed as a Java alternative without the JVM. Kotlin is the only practical alternative to Java on Android because of technical reasons (Scala stdlib is too big and the compile time ends up being too painful) - but I don't see how it has anything to do with the legal aspect (the entire platform is still built on top of JVM and tons of Java code).
It actually works rather well, specially as a C++ replacement.
I will say I watched his interview at codecon, and he seemed completely self absorbed. It didn't help that he kept bragging about Android popularity, which he had little to do with, on top of its awful design.
Think of this company as a future acquihire for someone like LG who needs a better flagship phone or for companies who wish to have an experienced, design-savvy team capable of delivering on IoT and mobile products. Or there is even a free letter over in the Alphabet company for an in-house hardware player comparable to Microsoft's Surface strategy.
I'm not knocking Mr. Rubin and I'm not saying I could have done anything anywhere near as successful myself. I couldn't have. He's clearly more talented and motivated than I am.
But, I also wonder:
Is Android anything but the number one, huge outlier in his business life? Isn't it plainly evident, even now, that Android is the biggest business success Mr. Rubin will ever accomplish?
If Mr. Rubin is truly a powerful, free-thinking force for life-enhancing technological innovation, uh, why did he go away for multiple years and ... come back with ... another phone?
Again, I'm not saying I'm as good as he is. Very far from it. But, isn't way more skepticism in order?
2) Andy Rubin's personal net worth post-Danger and post-Android is in nine digits. He is likely to set the terms of the investment, and those who think it's too expensive have moved along.
The wider vision will be an (assuming) quick roll out of assorted smart home/business tech built around the "Essential" brand, with a nice proprietary software layer linking it all up.
With his experience, I highly doubt anything he creates at this point would be acquired for much less than $300m (in this day and age, a $300m acquihire doesn't seem so out of reach...), so if they have participation preferred, might not even lose out.
I didn't understand NextStep or BeOS. But they were the final two choices (to replace Mac System 9).
Sometimes the innovation, execution has to happen on its own.
The long-term vision for Essential, Rubin said, is more closely aligned
with the Essential Home, which Rubin hopes you’ll put in your kitchen or
living room and use to control all the connected devices where you live.
[1] I mean truly open, the way he's done with Android. The Essential phone will already be more open that most phones on the market (unlocked bootloader), there's good reason to believe the Home will be too.
With all due respect, there's zero justification in your statement for the $1B valuation. There is bias, of the favorable kind, towards Andy, nothing objective.
Remember that the open market doesn't trade on pure emotion/bias only. Otherwise, many statements like yours could've saved Lehman Brothers from hitting $0 in value
Even if you can design a better phone, Apple has two massive moats protecting them, namely, iOS and their manufacturing prowess.
The investors in this are going to take a bath. Again, this isn't the outcome I want, but I think it's the outcome we'll get.
I don't know. HTC had some really high build quality models; did not do them much good (haptically, those were the best of their time). With Google beginning to crack down on vendors mangling the Android OS (part of the unified update strategy), differentiation from Android will be even more difficult.
So was Android.
It's a bet on Rubin himself and the team he's recruited, not on the current product.
I wouldn't support a different app store that competes with Google for control of Android.
There are substitutes for Search, Gmail, Apps Suite and Chrome, but the rest of the basic services are not that easy to replace. Maps with turn-by-turn directions, Google Translate, Google Photos with unlimited backup are all essentials for mobile consumers nowadays.
The real thing pulling to centralization is Google push, which requires play services, which requires playing by Google's rules.
If you don't have Google push on Android, you have to allow all the apps that want to get notifications from the server to keep open their own connections (which they may not have code for), which is going to kill battery life. The alternative is doing your own push services, but then you need to convince apps to support that, which generally requires apparent probable market share. Amazon managed to get some apps to do it for the Fire phone, but that didn't really go too well.