Ever heard of the phrase “end-to-end”? It’s what service providers use when trying to test out new products that they’re looking to bring to market. They test out every step of the process, be it order fulfilment, streaming entertainment or real-time data services. Part of that process is about catching the weakpoints and improving them, but it’s also about ensuring that adequate customer support mechanisms are there in order to catch things when they go wrong. Your perfectly designed product may start to fall apart when unexpected system behaviour creeps in, especially if the interactions between systems are complex and non-trivial. It’s therefore surprising when a firm seems to have dropped on this.
It became inevitable that Google would release the Nexus One once the period of “dogfooding” was completed. I’ve heard it more eloquently put as “drinking one’s own champagne”, but the process is the same. It may have been that this was little more than a holiday gift to its employees, as there’s little time to test anything between it starting on 12th December and going on sale on 5th January, especially with Christmas in the middle.
On paper the Nexus One has all the makings of a great phone. An OLED touchscreen, noise cancelling microphone and full speech-to-text tick a fair few boxes, along with a 3D capable display and turn by turn navigation. There is the glaring omission of multitouch and the limitation of only 512MB being made available for app storage, but on the whole it’s a solid package. Where things start to come unstuck is in the overall “service wrap”, or how you’re looked after as a customer once you have it.
As Google is selling the phone directly to customers, the margin of responsibility has become blurred. Early indications are that Google, htc (the manufacturer) and T-Mobile aren’t clear on the structure of this relationship themselves, with customers being the ones losing out, both with reception issues and ordering/storefront problems. Unsurprisingly there’s been a bit of a backlash from this, with some consumers feeling bitter about forking out $530 for a device that costs $174 to make.
Google are learning the hard way just what it means to have your name on the hardware, and how having integrated support for that hardware is important.It’s for this reason, above the technical considerations, why going for an iPhone or Palm Pre may be a more sensible choice at present. The bleeding edge is exactly that, with various improvements required before that edge becomes dulled. That said, there’s no reason why this is a bad thing for Google, Apple, or the smartphone market in general.
The competition between Google, Apple, Palm and RIM is certainly a good thing for the smartphone marketplace, and for consumers in general. With it quality should go up, while the price of this advanced technology should go down. Firms like Motorola who plan to use Andriod for all their future devices may feel threatened by Google’s stance. This may provide Microsoft with an opportunity to move back into the game when it releases Windows Mobile 7 later this year.
A gap is also emerging between smartphones such as Apple, Palm and Andriod, and those made by other firms such as Nokia, Samsung and LG. While the low-tech and low end area of the market can be a legitimate place to target, it’s usually where handset margins are squeezed. Traditional phone manufacturers need to be wary about being squeezed into this space by newcomers dominating the smartphone end. Richard Scoble probably has the right idea when he says that there is more likely to be competition between the web-friendly smartphone sector and the boxed-in group in the middle of the market. These phones with Facebook and Twitter apps “built-in” are likely to be squeezed out of the market as smartphones move to the middle-range.