jr conlin's ink stained banana

i've been thinking quite a bit about the reported (and reportedly inevitable) Google Phone, and the more i think about it, the less it really makes sense. Mind you, i would have said the same thing about Apple a few years ago, but then, they are in the high-priced gadget making business, so that move made slightly more sense.

First off, lets consider the motivation for Google putting out a phone. It's money. They want to be able to sell ads nice to you on a micro-specific targeting like a scene out of Minority Report. It's a huge profit motivator to steer traffic toward preferred vendors (ones that have ads) and away from "untrusted" vendors (ones that don't). Any other reason they give is bull, otherwise they'd be spending their money on world hunger and aid to Darfur and less about becoming your pocket pal.

So then comes the real question. No, not any of the ones you've read so far. It's "How can they convince the various carriers not to make as much money with this phone?"

Yes, you read that right.

Think about the various cellphone service plans out there. They charge you for everything. Want GPS? That'll be $5 a month please. Music? $3 a track, please. More than 100 messages a month? $15. Sure, you may have a great plan for $30 a month and they tossed in a phone you can talk into and hear things out of, but that's about the limit. You want more, you pay more. Google generally operates by giving away stuff and selling ads to support it, so it benefits them to make maps, mail, web access, and lots of other potential sources of ad context free. You know, the stuff that phone companies like to charge you for.

Phone companies are not really up on the idea of you not paying for stuff, and really, really up on you doing that. They're also not really up on the idea of anything with even the potential of breaking that model. Add in the fact that phone manufacturers are even less likely to damage that tight-knit relationship with their personal sugar-daddies and are openly hostile to most external programs that might.

Give you an example. Yahoo! has had Y!Go out for two years now. Y!Go is a fairly generic plugin that can run on almost any modern phone and ties rather nicely to Y!Services. It's been ported to hundreds of phones (i've seen the list, it's huge.) So why isn't it out for your phone?

Well, the problem is that most phones require applications to be "signed" before they can be installed or have access to things like your internal address book, the camera or dialing. (No, really.) Submitting applications for review and signing is a byzantine process at best, and normally involves sending your code for black box approval that may or may not involve animal sacrifice. If you're very lucky, the phone maker will approve the app, and then you get to go through the same process again with the carriers. Needless to say, writing the app is the easy part.

Granted, there is one other option, go virtual. Basically, resell some major carriers services under their own banner and hope like hell you get enough folks using you. This is what Helio is doing, but to be honest, it's not easy. History is littered with ex-MVNOs that should have been successful, and regardless, any MVNO is only as capable as the back-end network wants to make it. For instance, Helio's "unlimited" data tops out at 160MB per month, which is generally OK for most access (my top usage last month was one day at 640KB with a monthly total of about 2MB, so yeah, no fear of bumping against that wall) but that's with an untethered phone doing mostly web-browsing and mail. Plus, Google hasn't done a lot to endear themselves with the big companies, so i don't really see them getting any breaks, at least on the onset.

And yes, it's possible to buy equipment and then get a chip for a couple of carriers. This is what the OpenMoko folks are counting on, but the problem there is that you're still having to pony up big bucks before your toy becomes useful. Will Google recoup $50-100 per month to show ads on your phone? If they only pick up half, will they recoup $25-50 a month? Even at a dollar a day, those would have to be some darn pricey ads.

Google is a big gorilla. They own 40% of the online advertising market (not just online, all of it). The problem is they're going up against some pretty darn big, and very well established gorillas.

Needless to say, i firmly believe that Google has a customized OS that they plan on unleashing upon the planet with great fanfare and drooling acclaim.

What will be interesting is just how far they get.