The software and the phone

Google's announcement in November shook up the mobile phone world.

That world's 'incumbents' such as Nokia/Symbian and Microsoft may not agree.
But they won't contest two fundamental shifts.

One, the mobile has become the universal personal terminal; the pervasive
info-device always with you. And two, the shift from hardware. Software defines
the phone. Buyers buy hardware, but work with the software. When a Nokia user
buys more Nokia, it's the software. Even when the device looks as sexy as
Apple's iPhone, it's mostly the software.

Instead of a much-anticipated Gphone, Google announced a software stack for
phones, Android, based on a Linux-derived open-source platform. And backed it up
with an 'Open Handset Alliance' of 33 device and component makers, ISVs, telcos
and others.

So what? Well, here's a play at turning the phone into a PC-like platform:
open, standard, with a common software base, and every feature a software app.
(The PC's dominant OS isn't open, though.)

This won't be easy. Phone software is specialized. It's critically focused on
efficient use of power, memory and processing. Google is a late entrant, though
it's been working on the area since before 2005, when it acquired the Android
startup and Dodgeball (a mobile social networking project).

Google might compete with Apple too, though Android is an open software
platform, and the iPhone, a closed, tightly-integrated, proprietary product.

At the very least, Android gives some very powerful backing to the promise of
an open-source platform for phones, just as smartphone vendors were struggling
to counter the iPhone.

How will Google monetize this? First, by 'owning' a phone environment that it
can leverage for its core businesses, search and ad sales.

But it goes beyond that. Google might make a $5 billion bid for the US FCC's
auction of 700MHz spectrum in January. And it's testing an advanced wireless
network at its California headquarters. If the telcos control the handsets and
the apps today, Google promises a 'very open network'.

It helps to view announcements about the future with some cynicism, and
Microsoft and Symbian have been quick to provide it: This is vaporware, we
already have all this.

But Google's record means that most of the world expects great things from
it, even where it's been slow to enter-such as bringing search to the major
mobile platforms. But it had a bigger gameplan: its own platform.

Now it has its work cut out in 2008: reinventing the mobile phone.