The Future of GooglePhones
T-Mobile has announced that it will have actual, real-life, not-just-virtual phones that run on the new Google Android OS open source platform, better known as the GooglePhone, at the end of the year.
That’s the good news; the bad news is that T-Mobile does not seem to know what to do with it. They seem to believe that the direction for these new devices will come from the user.
Reading the comments from the panel of people quoted in the article does not help me feel more comfortable that T-Mobile and Google will pull this off. When asked what the killer apps would be, Nedim Fresko, director of strategic platform initiatives at Blackberry maker Research in Motion Ltd. (RIMM), listed security as the biggest thing that customers are looking for. I have to disagree. Customers are not looking for security from the top companies in the world; they expect it without question. They are not looking for it. Just like customers expect that all of the food in the supermarkets have been verified by the government and the food companies, they expect that any application from a major company has been tested and verified safe.
There is nothing wrong with looking for direction from the customer. Tech companies are well-known for releasing updated code frequently as users provide feedback. But phone companies are not known for being flexible and are not known for getting out of the customer’s way to let them experiment. In fact, the “security” concern listed above is more a big company issue with respect to getting sued. It tends to be used by companies for their “Big Brother” concern for their customers and their data.
The biggest issue with the laissez-faire attitude of T-Mobile with respect to the GooglePhone is that this is 180 degrees opposite what Apple did with the iPhone. Apple’s marketing campaign not only made customers want the sleek, shiny iPhone, but it also taught the customer what the iPhone was capable of and making the customer want it even more.
Without that tight interlocking of Apple’s message and customer expectations, would the iPhone have succeeded? Probably, but it would have required much more time to get the same sales result. And it would never have added to the mystic that the Apple name carries with it.
It sounds like Google and T-Mobile are planning to skip the marketing/educating portion of the GooglePhone release. It sounds like they expect that the message will be delivered by a variety of small tech companies building their own 3rd party apps using the Andoid open source OS. The problem is that such a patchwork of small tech companies with wildly different products will deliver wildly different messages. Will this work for Google and T-Mobile?
Technorati tags: T-Mobile, Google, Android OS, GooglePhone, Apple, iPhone, marketing message
Tags: Android OS, Apple, Google, GooglePhone, iPhone, marketing message, T-Mobile