Google gets the competition it deserves

At this week’s Mobile World Congress, the conference is focused on what happens next, now after Android has captured the majority of the world’s smartphone sales — and continues to gain share. Some distant clouds are on the horizon.

The WSJ this week asked whether the leading Android vendor, Samsung, is going to assert its buyer power against Google.

Google executives worry that Samsung has become so big—the South Korean company sells about 40% of the gadgets that use Google's Android software—that it could flex its muscle to renegotiate their arrangement and eat into Google's lucrative mobile-ad business, people familiar with the matter said.

The story said “Android head Andy Rubin … said Samsung could become a threat if it gains more ground among mobile-device makers that use Android.” The WSJ followed up with a blog posting asking “Can Samsung’s competitors catch up?” while Fierce Wireless reported a Samsung VP’s denial that Samsung’s success threatens Android.

The original WSJ story speculated that Samsung might ask for better terms, e.g. preferential access to technology.

In some ways, we’ve seen this story before. Symbian was supposed to be an open multi-vendor platform, but when Nokia accounted for 80%+ market share, it transformed both the Nokia-Symbian relationship and the level of interest and commitment by other vendors to Symbian. Yes, Google’s much richer and more independent than Symbian ever was, but it faces some of the same pressures that Symbian did. As it is, Samsung is making more profit from Android phones than Google is (an interesting reversal of the Microsoft-Dell exemplar).

(Google’s downstream vertical integration into Motorola is offered as an insurance policy, but since Motorola has been slowly dying for a decade, it’s not clear how credible a bargaining chip that is.)

Similarly, Samsung continues to support Tizen (the embedded Linux successor to LiMo, Moblin and Maemo), and plans on offering a new phone based on Tizen this summer. Samsung is using Tizen as an upward compatible replacement for its homegrown Bada, but it’s unclear how credible a bargaining chip Tizen will be — since it hasn’t offered a new Bada phone in two years.

The other challenge to Android comes with the introduction of the Firefox OS. Since handset OS makers — Google, Apple, Microsoft — are promulgating their own browsers, apparently the Mozilla Foundation figures they need an OS to put their browser into people’s hands.

The Firefox OS won support from LG, ZTE, Huawei and Alcatel, as well as serious interest from Sony (née Sony Ericsson née Ericsson) — but not from Samsung. It’s expected to ship from 18 carriers in nine countries, but not the US until at least next year.

There’s of course the question whether the world needs another smartphone OS, let alone another open source OS (remember webOS). After Android (69%) and iPhone (22%) together have 81% of the market, no other platform has more than 5% — with Tizen and Firefox starting behind Blackberry, WinMo and Symbian. But there’s no guarantee that the most popular OS in the US or Europe will be the most popular OS in China, particularly when China’s two largest handset vendors are supporting both Android and Firefox OS.

So based on recent history, Google’s concern in developed markets should be Samsung throwing its market power around (either within Android or to a rival platform), rather than having Firefox (or BlackBerry or WinMo) catch it any time this decade. It needs monitor Tizen or Firefox in the BRIC countries, but that could just be a matter of providing extra tech support engineers for Huawei and ZTE.