Blog Insights: Android will change the way the mobile phone industry works

If any non-telecom company could ever possibly change the status quo of the cell phone business, Google would be it. Such an initiative, if successful, would change the balance of power, tipping the scales in favor of smaller entrepreneurs. I talk about this possibility in my own blog, The Next Dotcom Boom. In short, what this would do is bring cell phones the ability to run virtually any type of application, from any application vendor. When you have a Windows PC for example, you can load any Windows-compliant application on it, regardless of who made it. Not so today with cell phones -- and the costly iPhone has brought that deficiency to the fore. This will create a whole new subindustry of cell phone application developers, as well as entrepreneurs who create cell-phone specific web sites.

Valleywag leaked some news about the very first Android application, and even gave us a few screenshots of what it will look like. It's a web application that shows users what stores are open that are nearby the user. On the Washington Post, blogger Rob Pegoraro gives us a bit more insight into Android. It's not going to be designed just for high-end, expensive handsets. It's conceivable that my own $15 Motorola could use Android apps too. And that's precisely the key to Android's success. The cell phone business has changed and will change in two steps: First, the iPhone raised the expectations of all cell phone users. Second, cell phone users who don't want to pay Apple's big prices (a fairly big population) want that type of functionality, but on a low-cost phone, and with fewer restrictions. Google's providing the second phase of that evolution.

But even though Google has already released the SDK, not everyone sees this project going through to completion. On a blog on Information Week, author Mitch Wagner is skeptical, cynically calling it "vaporware" and criticizing the project because it lacks a phone, and also because many of the major vendors aren't in on the alliance. True enough, and yes, it is vaporware at this point, Mitch, as was every other useful piece of software before it was fully developed and marketed. Google has the power a resources to see this through, and they've already committed some pretty big dollars to make sure they have a say in the telecom business (that is, bidding for spectrum in the upcoming FCC auction). And the reason that some major telcos aren't jumping on this bandwagon is precisely because Android will change the status quo. And big telcos that make lots of money on the way things are, don't want non-telcos coming in and shaking things up.