Android is on over 100 different devices and the number is growing. Android is already third biggest mobile OS in the US (22%, iOS and Blackberry both 27%) but the growth of Android can soon change when when hardware companies are stopping to sell their products with Android.
Google has the idea to offer the OS free and tries to get revenue later through advertisement in when millions of people are using Android. This seems to be a great approach. Make things cheap till they are viral and then when everybody is relying on it get a lot of money through advertisement in.
But exactly this approach can break Androids neck.
This economic benefit is offset by what appears to be a significant problem: When you separate revenue from a product, customer satisfaction will suffers.
For Android this has translated to Google creating products and then modifying them largely in a vacuum because the OEMs aren’t contributing to revenue and therefore don’t get any real vote. The attitude appears to be that if you are getting something for free then you should be happy with what you get.
This pulls the actual solution provider out of the decision process and that is why the Android products generally feel unfinished when compared to their iPhone, RIM (Research In Motion) and even Windows Phone counterparts, and things don’t seem to be improving very quickly.
This would not be the biggest problem if the service providers or hardware manufactures would have a focus on software development. Androids is open source and the OEMs could develop and optimize Android. But this drives to the next problem.
Staffing:
Android and it's Linux base is usually attracting more younger, inexperienced, unprofessional and arrogant developers who are brilliant with small ideas but generally never worked in an enterprise environment where small bugs can be the biggest problem. They never build commercial software which millions of people are going to use. They don't have yet worked where delivering on time is very important.
It is very hard for them to find developers who understand android and can fit into enterprise environment.
The next big problem is Google.
Google itself:
Google is a great company and at least 10 of my friends are working at Google and i am maybe jealous. All my friends working at google are under 25 and I am over 40, I applied at google but I am too old for them.
When i talk to my friends i hear many times how great Google is and how young everybody is, and this is a problem. And as soon a person at Google gets mature, the person starts a new company or goes to competition like Facebook.
I worked with many people in my life, and I worked with great people but the best I ever worked with were the people who worked already 10 years in corporations not the young 23 old high profile with Major from the MIT. It does not matter how brilliant a person is, if the person has no experience or nobody with experience supporting the person, then the results are most likely half as good.
As a result, great new software will be created but with more problems than holes in a Swiss cheese.
Some of the problems that Google is having aren’t unusual. Microsoft had similar staffing issues when they were ramping up to handle enterprise sales in the 90s, and IE6 problems were related to having a free product without a good alternative to revenue for measuring quality. This means that these issues can be corrected, but if one of the primary problems is one of communication, then Google may not yet fully grasp how bad they are. This is good news for challenging products like Windows Phone 7 and bad news for Chrome OS, which will likely have the same issues but be running against Windows 7 and not the mess of aftermarket OSs that Android came out against.
Therefore Android will slide soon down and Chrome OS might never be launched. When a company has not the correct staffing then the consumer will be the loser.
Not working with your partners together and to tell them just take it or leave it, does not work when the product is far from perfect. If google does not try to work with their OEM partners together and keeps this arrogance then Google does not understand how serious the problem is. Android is not a search engine which does not rely on hardware producers. Android raises and falls with the OEM partners.
If the Google management really believes that Chrome will replace 60% of enterprise OS then Google lost the sense of reality.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
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