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Google's Android: An Innovation Mishap?

Posted by Scott Anthony on June 24, 2008 7:57 AM

A Wall Street Journal article yesterday described how Android—a mobile phone operating system pushed by Google and more than 30 partners—is encountering some unforeseen difficulties.

These struggles aren’t actually that surprising. Chapters 5 and 6 of The Innovator’s Solution describe how pushing performance boundaries almost always requires that a single company control critical interfaces.

Google its partners are betting they can create a modular mobile phone operating system that anyone can pick up and use. They hope that Android makes it simple and cheap for third-party developers to encourage the use of the Internet on mobile devices, which will result in more advertising revenue for Google.

However, the Android team is still fine-tuning the operating system. Developers report being frustrated because they no sooner optimize an application for Android than the operating system changes. Getting a single Android-powered phone out the door for T-Mobile USA is sucking up almost all of Google’s Android-related resources.

Imagine how different it would be if Google was aggressively pushing its own phone forward (which it very well might be doing behind the scenes). Operating systems developers could coordinate closely with applications developers, allowing simultaneous performance improvements.

That's what Nokia is doing, moving in the other direction from Google. This morning, Nokia (the world's largest cell phone manufacturer) announced that it will acquire the rest of Symbian, a mobile phone software company in which it was a minority owner. By owning Symbian, Nokia controls development. By controlling development, Nokia avoids the complexity and of satisfying many stakeholders of a development consortium like Android's.

Pushing for premature modularity seems to be hurting Android’s development, potentially delaying or diminishing its market impact, while Nokia looks poised to strengthen its already strong leadership position. You don't hear this often, but in the battle for mobile phone software, Google may be one-upped.

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Hi Scott,

Your analysis on Nokia is too simplistic - in fact I think you have it completely the wrong way around.

Nokia is acquiring the shares of Symbian that it does not own in order that it can put the software assets into an open Foundation and ultimately open source the OS.

They will shepherd the process but presumably only for governance purposes in the short term.

Amongst device manufacturers it is now recognised that the phone operating system is not a competitive differentiator in and of itself. The innovation that drives sales occurs in marriage of the OS to the hardware, and UI and applications that are built on top. Nokia wants to get away from the PROBLEMS inherent in trying to do hardware and software together, not the other way...

Om Malik provides a comprehensive business analysis here.

BR/andy

- Posted by Andy
June 25, 2008 5:33 AM

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About this Author

Scott AnthonyScott D. Anthony is the president of Innosight, an innovation consulting and investing company with offices in Massachusetts, Singapore, and India. He has consulted to Fortune 500 and start-up companies in a wide range of industries. During 2005–2006 he spearheaded a yearlong project to help the newspaper industry grapple with industry transformation (Newspaper Next).

Anthony is the lead author on The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work (Harvard Business School Press, 2008). He previously coauthored (with Harvard professor Clayton Christensen) Seeing What’s Next: Using the Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).