I am sitting at the ITU Africa Forum Committee Meeting, about to engage in two days of discussion around the format and program of the event. In his welcoming address, Dr. Normal Lewis, chairman of the committee, talked about the importance of initiatives like Google Android which I hadn’t really checked until now. A Youtube search later I am impressed both by the technology and by the strategy.

What is Google’s objective? Get their search product in our hands.

How to manage the transition to mobile? Invent a Google phone? Very tempting, but then Google has to acquire new competencies, start a customer support service, manage broken phones, etc… And at best they get 10 or 20% of the market, and lose a few friends over at Motorola, Samsung and Nokia, people you prefer to have on your side. The right answer is to go software. Make a phone OS that is both sexy and free. Get all manufacturers to use it. Focus on what you do best, and let others do what they do best. Everybody in their place, and Google gets a shot at a much larger number of users at the end of the day.

Now to be impressed by the technology simply click on the play button below.

Google continues to make perfect sense.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 11:49 am and is filed under mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.