The Mythical Gphone
Here’s a fun exercise.
Do a Google search on the words “Gphone” and “two weeks.” You’ll get hundreds of thousands of hits, most of them saying pretty much the same thing: Google (GOOG) is about to unveil a cellphone that will change the world forever, or at least kill the Apple (AAPL) iPhone.
We’ve been skeptical all along, in part because Google has never shown any expertise — or interest — in building consumer electronics. And in part because the due date for the mythical Gphone was always shifting, always just a couple weeks or days away.
Today, we were assured by the Wall Street Journal — an assurance echoed by a hundred newsites that should have known better — was the day.
Did we get a Google phone? No.
What we got instead was a press release, a conference call, some self-indulgent videos, and a memo from Andy Rubin, the putative designer of the mythical phone (and hero of an adoring profile in The New York Times over the weekend), confirming what the naysayers have been saying all along: Google is not and will not be in the business of building phones.
What it’s offering — and trying to sell to the people who actually build the phones — is an operating system and some tools for writing cellphone applications. It’s a worthy enterprise and I wish them well. What it is not — as they are the first to say — is a Gphone.
Serious threat. Bwhahahaha. Google brilliant great in search and earns their right to be called great every 2 seconds but they honestly, go to their site and look at their software apps - it’s all over the board - the ICONS are not even the same … how can you hope to compete with Apple when you can’t get the most basic foundation right? Open phone foundation - great but what you will end up with is 86 phones with 86 different interfaces - Google is happy to have a hook in them but will it pose any threat to Apple - no. pretty much zero.
Do you notice the tendency of the press to rubbish anything that can, even in theory, compete with Apple?
If it is Windows or others, then the media does not fail to pepper the article with some “like Apple” or “less than Apple” or “clunky and unreliable” a-la Mossberg.
But in case of Google, this is a serious threat and the media (incl Elmer De Witt who is frequently attacked by Apple faithful for being err, unfaithful and refusing to automatically sing praise to the white fruit church) tries to find chinks in the “threat” to “their precious”.
Wake up, Apple is not anymore a putative underdog on the brink of bankrupcy which needs some non-commercial and contrarian support by enthusiasts of its innovative products. Apple is a predator top-dog that is likely to topple Microsoft in 2008 as the most valuable tech company, as such it is much more greedy and ruthless to its partners. Witness the treatment O2 got from them: O2 CEO proudly boasted that he got a call from Apple: “be in Cupertino by Tuesday”…like a spotty girl trembling on a call from the class’ hunk inviting her on a date in a secluded park at midnight…what a humiliation to O2!
People really shouldn’t believe what they read in the WSJ. As I wrote in March:
The media and blogosphere seem to be going ape over the idea of a Google phone.
I don’t buy it. Google is a search brand first and foremost. It isn’t a CE brand, and I don’t see this coming to fruition the way its being obsessed over. Google may be working on some kind of phone, but the brand is not a natural fit into the CE space, and I can’t seeing it being a premium product. I can imagine Google working withphone manufacturers to release a Google OS for phones, which hard-links intoGoogle online services, syncs with them, and operates in much the same way a Blackberry does - but better - but I can’t see them actually manufacturing and distributing a phone of their own.
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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
say goodbye to the iphone and hello to the android platform,
it will pretty much take over the mobile industry, open source rules, its been a good run iphone. maybe you guys can start on the next big iThing. oh and your new 3g iphone sucks bells.