November 5th, 2007
Google says no phone, just a spec
It’s not a phone! It’s nothing more than a spec sheet and an alliance.
After enormous hype, and with great fanfare, Google delivered what it calls the Open Hardware Alliance, a collection of 34 companies who say they support a Google specification based on Android, a company Google acquired earlier.
No GPhone, sorry. But look at this cool design!
T-Mobile and Sprint are listed as members of the OHA, but what does that mean, actually? Not a lot. Are they committing to opening their worldwide mobile networks to open standards, user-defined applications, and getting rid of their walled gardens?
No.
This is the Paris Hilton of product announcements. All those looks (they say), all that money, but what’s it all about, really, other than hype? In the case of Ms. Hilton, the answer was not much. At some point the markets are going to tell Google it should either put up or shut up. Ads on a search engine just aren’t that sexy. (Again, like Ms. Hilton.)
Google is not directly challenging anyone here. It’s not putting any serious money on the table, it’s putting nothing at risk. It’s like its talk about the 700 MHz auctions — we’ll bid X billion if you do things our way. You won’t? Then silence. Which means the incumbents win the new spectrum by default, and nothing changes.
Google is worth $223 billion right now and every once in a while (as with Android, as with YouTube, as with Blogger) it puts some of that funny money into peoples’ hands. But when is it going to risk anything? And when is all that investment in other people going to bring a financial return?
For any tech company, its bubble time is limited. Yahoo wasted its bubble time making Mark Cuban rich. Microsoft used its bubble time solidifying its dominance. I think Microsoft was smarter.
The Googlers, from here, right now, are starting to look like their Stanford predecessors, a couple of Yahoos. If the market finds that out, oy!
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 11/06/07
