The start of the revolution?

Okay, okay… that isn’t true, but with the launch of the first Android phone all thoughts are on where the hotly anticipated Apple v Google battle might end up.

Last time Stevo went properly head-to-head, it was back in the 80’s with him versus the rest of the PC industry. On that occasion he ended up being turfed out of Apple by some old bloke from Pepsi. Of course he bounced back from that little career blip to revolutionise animated feature films with Pixar, before returning to Apple as a hero and eventually becoming capo e tutti capi of must-have mobile phones.

This time around, he (along with Microsoft and Nokia) are the established players in the consumer sector (with RIM being the daddy in the corporate sector) and it is Google who are playing the classic Jobisan role of wild-eyed upstarts with their open-source Android stack determined to conquer the whole flippin’ market.

Of course, unlike your typical start up Google are a massive, highly profitable company who happen to pretty much own the internet and Android is just another route to the customer for their web-based contexual advertising. Which means that the commercial model is already figured out, which again is very unusual for a new entrant (and very ominous for everyone else).

Anyone who has switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox and then discovered all the hundreds of cracking plugins or who has spent some time messing about in the Apple App Store (or who has played Pirates on Facebook, etc, etc), knows all about third-party apps and their importance to new content-oriented consumer technologies.   With Android being open source and thus free to develop on, there is little doubt that developers will swarm around it, and already there is a rapidly expanding Android App Market (see more at techcrunch).

This will only get bigger and better as the new Android phones actually go on sale, which poses the question: How will Steve avoid getting left behind by Google?

The answer is he probably doesn’t care.  Apple knows its customers and it knows that it will never be the mass market model.  Sure this was the approach that got him canned the first time, but this time the market is bigger and the Apple fans are all rich 30 and 40 somethings that will pay for an iPhone and accept a smaller, but perhaps less buggy set of applications.  Of course being the unpredictable fella that he is he might just go all out make the the Apple stack open source, and then out-design Google’s handset partners…

How Microsoft and Nokia will react to Android as they are probably the real target is a very different story.  Didn’t Mr Balmer once say that he was going to f*cking kill Google?  Now might be the time to start walking the walk on that one.  However, Microsoft have got other issues on their agenda like yahoo, their share buy-back, life without Bill and how to f*cking kill Google in the search market (which isn’t going great).  And as for Nokia, well my hunch is that they’ll probably end up getting into bed with Android.

So expect to be owning an Android-powered phone in the not to distant future…. “When Google Rules the World”.

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