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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
//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.
"...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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.