Changing the mobile industry, one device at a time

Rich Miner, Group Manager of mobile platforms at Google presented this morning. His presentation was titled, "Changing the mobile industry, one device at a time." The content of his presentation was largely focused on Android, and not the TMobile G1. Rich first set the stage of why an open platform, Android, was long overdue in the mobile market. Using a lot of his mobile related startup experience (prior to joining Google) to drive his argument, Rich argued that openness of mobile platforms is the primary catalyst for the tipping point of the mobile revolution. 5 years ago, it was nearly impossible for a startup developer to get their app onto a mobile phone. The operators were simply too monolithic and closeminded to streamline the process. Paraphrasing Rich with regard to mobile operators, it takes 100 people to agree on something, but only 1 to say no and slow the whole thing to a halt. Another anecdote he mentioned was related to a push to talk service he was trying to get off the ground. The service was being developed on the Windows Mobile platform. His team actually found a bug in the Windows Mobile code. Upon approaching Microsoft to fix the bug, Microsoft indicated it would take 18 months to complete. Wow that is a long time. They must not be using the agile development methodology.

After describing why closed platforms have stifled innovation in the mobile market (something I absolutely agree with), Rich continued on to give all the reasons why Android fixes these problems.

Couple other gems from the presentation:
"Google sees 50 times the searches on an iPhone than any other platform."
When the first versions of Google Maps Mobile (written in Java) were developed, and Google was trying to convince the operators to ship the app with the devices, Google experienced a lot of grief and resistance. The operators indicated that even if the users loved the app, they suspected there were unspoken motives for Google wanting to distribute the app. In some cases, operators disabled the underlying service for Google Maps Mobile, so even if the user was able to install it themselves, it was unusable.