Et Tu, Andy: Did Google Betray or Bungle?

Picture this. You are Sanjay Jha at the helm of Motorola, makers of the infamous Droid smartphone. Together with Verizon you have spent $100 million promoting this phone as the latest and greatest. While billboards are still up on Highway 101 and ads are still running on TV and radio, your good buddies at The Googleplex come out with their own phone manufactured by a competitor running a newer version of the Android OS, in this case 2.1, trumping the version you shipped with.

 

Then, while your efforts, now shown to be running outdated software, may have been nice, your “partner,”Google, working with HTC (News - Alert), has come up with a competing device offering “… the best possible Google experience.”

 

Huh?

 

Silicon Valley is an interesting place. It is a wealthy, highly educated, tech savvy place where sometimes you see billboards talking about FPGAs and ASICs and with NASA Ames across the road from Google, yes indeed there are a bunch of rocket scientists here too. That said, with great technical capability and intelligence, you sometimes get a bit of Asperger’s Syndrome (a mild, usually high functioning type of autism), which used to be just eccentricity or Mad Scientist Syndrome.

 

One aspect of Asperger’s is an inability to really “get” social interaction on a gut level. There may be an intellectual understanding of certain things, but it is an effort. Lack of empathy and an inability to read subtle aspects of intonation, body language and other verbal and non-verbal social cues can make for some awkward moments.

 

Like when you tell your good partners that while their phone may not quite suck that is certainly does not offer “the best possible Google experience”, unlike your device, which most assuredly does off the best possible experience. Intentional knife in the back or just a socially clueless autistic moment?

 

Although Microsoft (News - Alert) has often been viewed as the opposite of the open platform approach as seen in Android, the backfist to the face delivered by Andy Rubin to everyone building phones on Android beyond HTC (a rising star and seemingly Mountain View’s Golden Child – expect to see market share reports no longer clumping them in the “other” category soon) reminds me of Redmond’s own partner facing Asperger’s moment when word of the Microsoft device, Pink, slipped out, vexing everyone who was trying to build a phone on Windows Mobile (or is that Windows Phone (News - Alert) now or does it even matter anymore?) only to follow up with a brilliant final betrayal of the last partner that they hadn’t betrayed, Sharp, who was going to build Pink, by snuffing Pink. Reminds me a lot of some of those Shakespeare plays where everyone kills everyone else and special characters had to be introduced at the end to drag the bodies off.

 

Fortunately for Google, they are, at least for now, in a very strong position indeed. Giant war chest, tremendous resources and what seems to be almost unstoppable momentum in the mobile space. In a world where even pennies on the BOM can make a big difference, an OS that is not only free but also better than just about everything else out there with the possible exceptions of Apple (News - Alert) and Palm, is a powerful persuader and for most will be adequate to get them over the hump presented by “all partners are equal but some partners are more equal than others when it comes to providing the Best Possible Google Experience.” For now.

 

Used to be that Steve Jobs (News - Alert) was the only sheriff in this town. Now we have another, just not clear if he’s wearing a white hat or a black one.