2010-12-13
Choosing Your Market
I was taken by this section from Tim Bray’s post about Android, the iPhone, and the US Department of Defense:
the total DoD head-count is estimated at around 2.5 million. If you pick demographics that you might want to pitch mobile devices to, here are a few that are similar or larger in size:
Korean teenagers
Euro-zone business travelers
Canadian retirees
World of Warcraft players
Indian cricket fans
This whole consumer-device business is oddly pure.
I’ve always been annoyed at the amount of bending over backwards that the UK government does for military manufacturing, not only because making things whose primary purpose is destructive is pretty rubbish, but also because it seemed better to me to have a market of millions of people buying small things than a tiny market of maybe twenty sovereign states (maybe) buying a few score million-pound things.
2010-01-31
post/363181850
Brooke Crothers, a couple of weeks ago, in Tablet runs Motorola-Verizon software, Android. Maybe Google might not want to compete with a tablet, but ICD/Motorola/Verizon might.
On the other hand, even this short demo feels like it shows a lot of the dangers for an Apple competitor. For example, the commentary on the video states that the device can run either Android or Windows CE: why not pick just one? The photos app looks nowhere near as straightforward or, for want of a better word, pleasurable as the iPad’s demo has.
On top of that, the fact that multiple companies are involved is usually a bad sign. Still, it’ll be interesting to see if this can resist the juggernaut when (if?) it ships.
2010-01-29
Competing with iPad
Everyone’s talking about the iPad, so I started thinking a little further down the road. After all, if windows and mice really aren’t the future of computing, and touch screens are, you’d hope there’d be more than one manufacturer of devices in Our Glorious Computing Future. At least, I hope there is.
So, who’d make them? I can tell you who won’t: anyone relying on Windows. Microsoft’s done very well out of the last twenty years of computing, but the last decade has shown their inability to move with the times. Windows Vista was an obvious mis-step, but so is their series of Tablet Editions, because they failed to do what the iPhone OS did: rethink the interface. Instead, they expect a thin film of touch interactions to be enough, and it’s not.
Similarly, Windows Mobile’s reliance on a stylus and vestigial metaphors - the Start button, for example - hardly shows any signs of being the foundations for a usable device. Dan pointed out there’s a chance that the Xbox division might manage, and I suppose the Zune folks might have a chance, but I’d not hold my breath.
Of course, since almost every PC manufacturer relies on Microsoft for their OS, that rules out the likes of Dell, HP, Asus and Sony. So who’s left?
Nokia have dabbled with tablets before, and with the N900, they seem to have a fairly decent handheld device. Maemo might just make a good enough layer on top of Linux, but do they have the vision to make the hardware? Unfortunately, my gut feeling is that they don’t. Two or three years ago they might have been able to get away with a grand visionary play, but now, with the iPhone and Android going after their most profitable market segment, they look a bit like a wounded giant, trying to make sure they’re still going.
So that leaves Google. Their biggest issue, as far as I can tell, is that they have two OSes which overlap uncomfortably right at the point the iPad exists: the (announced but unreleased) Chrome OS, and the aforementioned Android. I don’t know enough to tell which fits better, but I expect one of them would be fine.
The company has other problems, too. So far Android hasn’t included multi-touch in the core OS or apps, because of the fear of patent litigation from Apple. It’s possible there’ll be a deal to resolve that, one way or another. In fact, I really hope there is: otherwise the monopoly I alluded to earlier will become a reality. The other issue is that they’re still not an experienced hardware manufacturer. Their first consumer product, the Nexus One, is built for them by HTC, and they’ve had teething troubles with customer relations, especially to do with getting phones working with telecoms companies. Maybe a licensee will make a tablet first, but you could argue the potential of the phone OS didn’t really surface until there was an in-house design; maybe the same would be true of a pad.
However, of all the people listed here, I suspect Google are by far the best placed to compete with Apple. Now all I have to do is wait a few years and see how wrong this post was.
2008-09-16
Android at Google Developer Day London
As part of the keynote of Google’s Developer Day in London, Mike Jennings ran a demo of Android on prototype hardware. (In fact, it may have been the first public demo of such in Europe.) Some notes:
- It works, and not slowly.
- The name of the device manufacturer was covered in tape.
- The browser seemed to load + render Slashdot on a private wifi network about as quickly as my iPod touch on the public one did
- Maps works pretty much the same on both
- The public network’s SSID makes my iPod think it’s in San Jose (is there a song joke here?)
- The demo hardware had an accelerometer, and there was a “blue dot” demo app with basic physics
- Unlike Aral, I don’t think I’d notice the lack of multitouch
- It looks like the application menu is alphabeticised, which might be a nice solution to the problem of managing long app lists.
Although I don’t really have any reason to go to the Android talks, this did make them seem a bit more appealing.
