Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
Wow! Now that was a crazy week for the mobile device market.
First Google went all crazy in announcing plans to acquire Motorola Mobility to the chagrin of it seems just about everyone; and just yesterday Hewlett-Packard went even crazier announcing it was basically shuttering its mobile operations including the WebOS business it acquired along with Palm last year for more than $1 billion.
I am just going to blame this level of crazy on the heat.
On the topic of Google/Motorola, it appears most of the consternation comes from the fact that Google already seemed to have a pretty good relationship with just about every device maker in the world by providing its Android platform to power just about every smartphone that did not start with an “i”.
But, with the acquisition of Motorola, it seems that the company is looking for a bit more focus in the space as it would have direct control over a bona fide device maker that already is just about exclusively reliant on Android for its very existence. This could be a good thing as it might allow Google to more tightly integrate Android into a more universal platform that can really compete against Apple’s iOS/iTunes/iPhone/iPad/iAnything model.
Some have tried to market Android as a real alternative, but most have realized that there is still too much fragmentation in the model for the OS to be at the center of a greater ecosystem.
Does the acquisition of Motorola solve this? Well, at least in the United States, Motorola has a pretty established brand, and I am sure there are still a handful of people out there carrying around Razr’s and Startacs, or at least enough people that still have fond memories of these pioneering devices.
Of course, most noted that the real reason for the deal was so that Google could lock up some prime patents that have become trading chips in the “new” mobile economy. And while $12 billion would seem to be a lot of money for just about every other company – and is a 60+% premium over Motorola Mobility’s closing price prior to the deal being announced – well … Google is not every other company.
Speaking of not being like every other company, HP’s announcement to shutter its mobile business showed that HP is not like every other company. The decision this week by HP looks to bring a fitting end to a platform that launched with so much potential, only to be mismanaged into oblivion.
Now, maybe we need to give HP some credit in that it has for years tried to find a footing in the mobile space, only to find few wanting to take advantage of what it had to offer. The purchase of Palm seemed to finally provide HP with something that would set it apart and build from, though it quickly noted that it was still not looking to be a device maker and would instead be looking to place the WebOS into such hot technology items as printers. Printers!?!
I still remember attending the Palm WebOS/Pre launch event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas what now seems so many moons ago. I remember vividly having to trek what seemed like hours from the Las Vegas Convention Center where most of the show was taking place to the Venetian Hotel where Palm had lured hundreds of media types to show off its reinvention.
I also vividly remember that all of my grumbling quickly vanished when Palm’s “savior” Jon Rubinstein, who had audaciously left Apple to reignite the falling fortunes at Palm. The Pre’s form factor quickly made everything short of the iPhone look like a Palm Treo, and the WebOS to me looked to have all the makings of a world beater.
However, Palm’s inability to quickly gain market share, something most blame on its initial exclusive launch plans with Sprint Nextel, and insistence on keeping the OS in house crippled the company’s growth. Just a few months later, Google would begin flooding the market with Android operating systems and quickly become the only real competitor to Apple’s iPhone.
As for Palm, a need for cash forced it into the hands of HP, which had a history of not knowing what to do with what it had, and with this week’s announcement showed that it really had no idea of what to do with what it had.
With the way WebOS has been handled since inception, was there really any other way it could end?
Again, all of this would have been enough craziness to last several months, let alone have both of them happen within the same week. Here’s hoping we can get out of these dog-days of summer before a new level of insanity hits the mobile space and something really crazy happens.
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA this week got all in each other’s grills about who had the largest “4G” network coverage.
Verizon Wireless kicked off the festivities with claims that its LTE-powered network now covered more than 160 million potential customers, or as it stated “to more than half the U.S. population.” T-Mobile USA countered with the claim that its HSPA+ network covered more than 200 million people, thus taking the title of largest “4G” network.
Just for this moment I am going to put away the questionable marketing tactics of using the term “4G” for either of these services, and just bask in the glow that is two mega-corporations bickering over semantics like a couple of grade-school children. Good stuff.
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