Why Google isn’t winning the smartphone wars
I’ve argued before that Apple is good at producing great user interfaces thanks to its top-down, designer-centric product development process. But that approach becomes a liability for building scalable network services. For those kinds of tasks, Google’s bottom-up, engineer-driven organizational structure works better.
Man, I hope that isn’t just a fancy intro for “I don’t understand the difference between profits and marketshare” or I’m going to be really annoyed shortly.
A good way to visualize this is by thinking of a computing platform as a funnel.
A funnel? O… K…
At the narrow end of the funnel is a human user with an extremely limited capacity for absorbing information. At the fat end of the funnel is “the world”—the collection of websites, devices, people, organizations, or other entities with which the user might wish to exchange information. The job of a computing platform is to connect the two—to filter and organize the vast amounts of information at the fat end of the funnel into a form that is digestible by the user at the skinny end.
OK, that actually makes some sort of sense, so don’t ruin it.
Google and Apple like to start from opposite ends of the funnel, and this tendency is reflected in the mobile OSes they’ve built. Apple starts with the skinny end of the funnel, making the user interface as simple and intuitive as possible. They do this by tightly controlling as much of the technology “stack” as possible. Because iPhone, iOS, the iTunes Store, Mac OS X, and iCloud are all made by the same company, they offer unparalleled polish and effortless interoperability.
Apple also starts by inserting its iOS devices into the skinny end of the funnel and sits laughing as MASSIVE PILES OF CASH PROFITS belch out of the fat end.
Google, in contrast, focuses on the wide end of the funnel. The company has focused on making Android work gracefully with as much of the “real world” as possible.
Unlike Apple, whose devices don’t work gracefully with the… Hang on, what?
When Apple was building its own hardware, Google was cutting deals with numerous hardware manufacturers.
Who gracefully conspired to screw over users by welding tons of crap to the devices that users didn’t want. Great.
While Apple was negotiating an exclusive deal with AT&T that gave Cupertino control over the user experience, Google offered liberal licensing terms in an effort to get all wireless carriers on board.
And, man, that turned out great for everyone. Well, apart from, as already noted, the users. And Google, who lost control of its own platform. Still, the carriers are happy, so who cares, right? (These being the carriers who, by and large, now also stock the iPhone.)
Google is not only has more liberal app store rules, it also allows third parties to develop app stores of their own. As Eric Schmidt put it last year: “If they say no, we say yes.”
‘They’ clearly say: “We say no to screwing up the user experience”.
Lee then admits Google’s approach has disadvantages, in buggering up the user experience and in offering half-baked features. But he argues that’s not as bad as Apple’s problem:
In its quest to avoid ever subjecting an iPhone user to features that feel half baked, Apple insists on maintaining control over the entire technology stack. That produces simple, intuitive user interfaces, but it makes it harder to interoperate with third parties who may not be willing to cede control to Apple. In other words, Apple’s obsessive focus on the narrow end of the funnel limits how wide the wide end of the funnel can be.
This being the wide end of the funnel that’s landing MOAR MONEY on Apple’s cash mountain, remember.
This explains why iOS has been losing ground to Android even though most people agree that the iPhone is the best single smartphone on the market.
These being the figures that of late show Android plateauing? And the ones that show how Android manufacturers are making naff-all profit compared to Apple?
There are tens of millions of people who care most about the narrow end of the funnel. They want the best user interface, and are willing to make compromises on other fronts to get it. Most of these customers will opt for an iPhone. But there are hundreds of millions of customers who care more about some other factor. They want a phone from their favorite carrier, a phone with a physical keyboard or a removable battery, a phone with their choice of app store, a phone they can get for free with a contract, a phone they can get with a pre-paid plan, etc.
Most users actually don’t care about those things. Some think they do, but ultimately many of them don’t. A whole load of people went for Android phones in the US because the iPhone was only on AT&T. But with the exclusivity agreements now gone, that’s no longer the case. And bar the anti-Apple crowd, I can’t think of anyone who went with Android because they wanted a “choice of app store”. The cost aspect is about the only really relevant point here, and, guess what? Low-cost phones are also low-profit ones.
No single phone (wireless carrier, hardware manufacturer, etc) can satisfy all of these diverse customers. Only a platform designed to support many different phones from many different manufacturers on many different networks can cope with this kind of diversity.
“I still believe that Apple should have continued to license Mac OS all those years ago!”
And things will only get more challenging for Apple as the smartphone market globalizes.
True. It’s going to be damn hard to figure out where to store its mountains of cash.
Android’s relatively liberal licensing model will make it much easier for overseas partners to customize Google’s software to the needs of local markets, while Apple’s “my way or the highway” licensing model rubs potential partners the wrong way.
Unlike Google, who announced way back in March (Business Insider) that it was to tighten its grip on Android?
This is especially true in Asia, which has the majority of the world’s population, and where lower average incomes make consumers price-sensitive.
So, we’re essentially back to “I don’t understand the difference between profits and marketshare”? JOURNO SMASH!
When Timothy B Lee here argues that “Google’s bottom-up, engineer-driven organizational structure works better” what is it exactly he covers and from what point of view it’s “better”?
Seems like he’s approaching it from a users point of view that Google’s engineer-way in a whole is better considering ALL users than design-centric Apple way.
I think that is crap. Guessing there is “tens of millions of people” who want a smartphone that just works and is easy to use to “hundreds of millions” who care more about physical keyboard or their choice of app store is just not realistic.
NORMAL people, those average moms and dads, young adults and older people, they are sick of technology machines that need a support person to be able to use them. NERDS and TECH-SAVVY, those interested in technology, are willing to handle all the problems the machines but them into but not normal people.
Normal people want technology that doesn’t require nursing them all the time.
Many geeks (who aren’t necessarily “anti-Apple”) genuinely prefer Android’s more open app architecture. Perhaps they require OS-level Google Voice integration. Or maybe they want to replace the stock keyboard with an alternative like Swype. They can’t do these things on iOS without jailbreaking.
Advantages like these weren’t enough to sway me from the iPhone, but I can see the appeal.
@Matt: Ironically, I removed “and geeks” from my edit of the article, because I thought it’d piss people off. Either way, I think the vast majority of smartphone customers don’t give a flying crap about customisation and alternative apps stores—they just use whatever’s on the device (be it Android, iOS, WP7 or something else). Also, it’s worth noting that you often can’t customise Android devices without rooting.