this is violence

The idea that Android is to the mobile space what Windows was to the PC space is an idea that crops up from time to time. My take on this is that the relationship between society and technology is too changed and too dynamic to make any one-to-one comparisons like that. Also, I assume Windows will be the Windows of the mobile space, but whatever.

One place though where this seems be to actually, sadly, true is in the rise of bloatware on Android phones. Having worked for a couple different Windows based computer companies, I was always amazed and dismayed at the power partner marketing groups within these companies had to force software and sometimes hardware onto machines.

It’s one of the things that turned to me to Apple.

My guess, and it’s nothing more than that, is that if Google wants to avoid some of the pitfalls that have plagued Microsoft as a brand, they’re going to have to do what Microsoft never did: own the hardware. Obviously the Nexus One was this, but it seems like Google didn’t, or doesn’t, have any long term vision for this product line in the way Apple has had for the iPhone. Without that, it seems like increasingly, the Android experience is going to be what carriers or handset manufacturers want it to be. At this point, I’m not even sure you can differentiate between the OS and the hardware it runs on. To have a coherent experience, I think you’d need to recognize them as intrinsically tied.

In larger sense it points out, for the millionth time, that if you want own your brand experience, you have to own it top to bottom, no matter what you do.

update
Microsoft doing what Microsoft does with these things: After spending a lot of time redesigning Windows Mobile 7 in an “authentically digital” UI, Microsoft had said they would not allow manufacturers to modify it. I thought this was a great move. While still not as good as MS creating it’s own hardware, at least they’d have some sense of what the end user experience would be. Then I read this today.

Oh well.