In case you hadn’t heard, Google liked Motorola Mobility so much it put a ring on it. That is, they bought the entire company, at a cost of about $12 billion.
This caught pretty much everybody by surprise, although in retrospect, the writing was on the wall as early as January, when Motorola spun off its cellphone business because they were sick of losing money. It was kind of the equivalent of casting an elder off into the woods to die: Motorola’s one ray of hope was the Droid, but unlike the iPhone, there was massive amounts of competition with dozens of Android handsets.
Google, meanwhile, had been fiddling with hardware for a while but had learned the hard way with the Nexus that you can’t just knock off the iPhone and call it a day. They’d also been learning the hard way that making something somewhat open source means, to large corporations, “please, figure out a way to break me!” The result: Android had 48% of the smartphone market, but got thumped in the nuts in terms of customer satisfaction by Microsoft, of all people.
So, what does this mean to you, the customer? In six words: Bend over and spread them wide. This is bad, bad news, in just about every respect. Why?
Android’s Days Are Numbered
Android caught on for one reason, and one reason only: It was fairly well designed, it was customizable, even if those customizations meant “breaking the damn OS” or “leaving out Marketplace,” and it was cheap. And that was something other handset makers desperately, desperately needed.
Apple is widely praised for being great at designing products and marketing itself, but to the rest of the handset world, it’s Genghis Khan, burning their crops and hearing the lamentations of their women. Motorola itself is a great example, since after its enormously successful Razr, it started sinking in 2007. Nokia’s boss has admitted that if their Windows phones aren’t hits, the company is dead. BlackBerry is currently struggling to remain relevant to anybody other than their business enterprise customers.
Which brings us to Samsung and HTC — who went all in on Android and Windows Phone 7 to compete with Apple. Samsung is currently facing a patent war with Apple, and HTC isn’t far behind.
So…let’s say you’re Google. You just dropped $12 billion on a company. You want to turn your market share into something enormously profitable. Do you keep your valuable OS “open source?” Or do you throw your now-competitors, who are currently getting eaten alive by your main enemy, to the wolves? Especially since, even though it’s greatly improved, to most of the world “Windows operating system” is still a punchline?
Kiss Your Privacy Goodbye
Recently, Facebook got into yet another privacy stink because essentially any Facebook app you put on a smartphone uploads your entire contacts list to Facebook’s servers — where they keep it forever and ever.
Here’s the thing: Google, as we’ve detailed, has the same motivations and is a whole lot better at collecting information about you. We don’t mean to imply Google is somehow assembling a psychological profile of everybody who uses their services, just that they could, pretty easily, and the ease of tying your Android smartphone or tablet to your Google accounts means you’re pretty much giving them access to everything about you. Hope you cleaned up your porn history before signing on.
It’s Going to Murder Innovation
Why? Let’s look at tablets, and how the market is rapidly collapsing into an Apple-shaped black hole.
One of the big failures of Android has been the fact that, unlike smartphones, it’s been unable to ding the tablet market in any truly meaningful way. Part of this is just the screwups on the part of everybody making a tablet — the Motorola Xoom comes with lots of useless crap nobody wants and costs $100 more than the iPad. The BlackBerry Playbook actually shipped without a freaking email client, and let’s not even get started on HP’s sad attempt to revive Palm. True, Android does have a double digit share of the tablet market — 20% to Apple’s 75%.
How bad is it? Apple currently controls, let’s see here, 61% of the entire tablet market. To give you an idea of what a big deal that is, it made Apple the number one company in mobile computing this year so far. Not a contender. Number freaking one.
In fairly short order, it’s going to be just Google fighting just Apple, meaning an experienced consumer products company with a huge fan base is squaring off against a software company that bought somebody just to sell tablets. Expect to see this repeated in cellphones too — you’re going to be buying a lot of Apple products.
The Products Themselves Are Probably Going to Suck
We’ll give Google this much credit: They learn from their mistakes, and it’s unlikely that we’ll see a repeat of the whole Nexus S disaster. Motorola Mobility will largely be left to build their devices on their own.
Of course, these are the people who looked at the iPad and said, “You know what that needs? A barometer.” No, seriously. That $600 beast has a barometer for more accurate weather predictions. Also a magnetometer and a gyroscope, for no explicable reason.
Look, the Droid is uniformly great and gets great reviews, but realistically speaking, it’s just an evolution of phones Motorola has been making for years. Force them to enter a new market, and you get a machine with lots of useless crap bolted onto it, like the Atrix’s sad attempt to take over the laptop market. What’s going to happen as tablets take off? We’re a little afraid of what the “budget Xoom” will look like.
Ultimately, It Means Apple and Google Will Control the Technology Market
Hey, remember when Microsoft ran everything? Wasn’t it awesome, except totally not, what with the innovation strangling and the terrible software?
Yeah, we can expect the same thing to be happening in the 2010s, only Apple and Google will share being the evil overlords.
Google is very, very good at designing software that fits naturally into your life. There’s a reason every free email site now looks like GMail, and why any site offering directions is either using Google Maps or looks just like it. In that world, they are an innovator.
Apple, on the other hand, is very good at making computers that both hipsters and your mom would like to buy, for entirely different reasons. It’s easy to forget, especially for tech junkies, that to a lot of people, computers are basically guns with screens and keyboards; neat but scary and dangerous. It’s useful to look at pop culture to explain this. Here’s the trailer for Sandra Bullock’s “The Net.” This movie is from 1995.
Awful, right? This is the trailer for “Untraceable”, from 2008:
Yeah, noticing a theme here? The technical details have changed, but the basic narrative is the same: “HACKERS WILL KILL US ALL!”
To anybody under the age of 35 or so, both of these movies are ridiculous. But it’s worth remembering that, to movie studios, who focus group the hell out of this stuff, these were going to make money. Which they did.
Apple is great about making soft, safe computers. Sure, nerds hate the hell out of them, but nerds are not Apple’s primary market. Your mom is. And if they promise your mom a simple, easy, and effective way to send email and surf the Web for cat pictures, and deliver it, then they’re going to make a lot of money. The iPad is limited in a lot of ways, but for most people, the iPad is all they need.
Google and Motorola aren’t really poised to get this. It’s not the lack of a Steve Jobs or some B.S. “intangible” analysts like to throw around, it’s that they make computers for people who aren’t afraid of computers. That’s not the market anymore. Google will still make a fortune: Google apps will run on those iPads, after all. But they won’t be able to integrate the tech and the software.
And until they get this, Apple’s going to stay on top. Or until a new innovator shows up. We can dream.