Google announced today its participation in the Open Handset Alliance, a group of 34 mobile and tech organizations dedicated to bringing an open platform to mobile phones. The awesomely named platform, Android, was also announced. Right now there's nothing--absolutely bubkiss--in the way of pragmatic effects. The software will be in the hands of developers next week, and we shouldn't expect to see phones until the second half of 2008, which is leading some spectators to call this a PR move. I prefer to see it as just one more step towards Google running my entire life.
"It's important to recognize that the Open Handset Alliance and Android have the potential to be major changes from the status quo -- one which will take patience and much investment by the various players before you'll see the first benefits," wrote Andy Rubin, Director of Mobile Platforms, on the Google blog . "But we feel the potential gains for mobile customers around the world are worth the effort."
The last few weeks have seen an incredible amount of buzz--5,330,000 hits on Google, to be precise--about a potential gPhone coming out as an iPhone killer, but that's not the direction the company is going in. Instead, it's looking to create a platform for "thousands of gPhones."
It's a similar move to Google's recently announced Open Social. When Google lost out to Microsoft on a bid for a stake in Facebook, Google simply turned around and announced plans to offer a set of common APIs to build social network applications on. And, by the way, Google CEO Eric Schmidt adds that "OpenSocial apps will run well on Android." Likewise, Google is one of the founding members of a new group dedicated to creating open standards for virtual worlds .
In other words, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? (Or, less pithily, why invest substantially in the existing products when you can create a broader platform and potentially take away their revenue streams while slowly building an infrastructure that the entire tech world needs?)
If you don't believe that Google is taking over, just look at what these children (the future) have to say:
[Check out the Google blog here , the official press release here, and Engadget's liveblog of the press call here.]
Add a comment