SDK from the Open Google Alliance

I made a mistake in reporting last week on something called the Open Handset Alliance. Despite my reporting (and the press releases and news stories) and what it claims on the Google Code pages, today there is no Open Handset Alliance. There is a Google-owned project called "Android."

A friend asked (quite reasonably) "Just curious if you have downloaded [the] Android SDK ... I don't want to commit my company to whatever the license says so I'll hold off on doing my own analysis."

I did a little snooping and what I found:

• Looking at the download site and the license terms made clear: the download greement is with Google, Inc., a Delaware corporation, not the so-called "Open Handset Alliance". (Thus putting the lie to the idea of the OHA being "co-sponsored" by four other companies.)
• There's no source code on the site, under an Open Source Initiative-approved license or any other license.
• According to the architecture diagram, as much Android code as possible is based on a BSD (or comparable) permissive license. No viral GPLv3 here, so presumably DRM and music players will be available on gPhones.
• Android is a platform for Java applets, not native C/C++ apps. Symbian, of course, has native apps, and it sounds like even Apple will have a native app SDK before the gPhone ships.

Alas, the SDK requires an Intel-based Mac (or Windoze) to run, and my first Intel Mac is about 2 months away. So unless I can borrow someone else's machine, I won't be doing any development any time soon.

Engineers get no respect

Restaurant owner Scott Adams this week summarized the problems that talented engineers (Silicon Valley or otherwise) face at the hands of pointy-headed bosses.
My direct experience with such abuse is more than 20 years old. I quit my last engineering job in 1986 because they wouldn't take my product ideas seriously (two ideas they implemented under external pressure within 18 months of my leaving the company). Then for 15 years I ran company founded by two engineers, where it was the non-engineers who got no respect (that's right, Rodney, no respect).

So while I post this cartoon on behalf of fellow Beavers everywhere, the reality is that I'm probably doing my part to make their life worse. Every time we inflict upon a tech company a manager or marketing person who took business because (s)he wasn't good enough at math to be an engineer, we are contributing to this problem. My dual MBA/MSE students are great — like I once was, they may be better engineers than managers (6+ years of engineering training but 18-24 months of business training), but at least they'll understand the technology that makes the business possible.

Fortunately, many of our undergrads are taking low tech jobs, while our MBA programs continue to be filled with engineers (taking the path required by HP 15 years ago) starting as engineers, getting an MBA, and then resurfacing as marketing experts. Sure, I can see hiring someone to sell digital cameras from Sony or P&G, but I hope you wouldn't find your enterprise computing or semiconductor equipment rep there.

Microsoft's survey of opinion leaders

I was minding my business last week, trying to finish grading when the phone rang. The call came from the 204 area code (Manitoba, I later learned Winnipeg), and the caller identified herself as being with Ipsos Public Affairs. For participating in a survey I was offered a $50 donation to one of a variety of charities, both blue chip (Alzheimer’s, Cancer Society, American Heart Association) or socially conscious (Habitat, Doctors without Borders) but not the charity Peter Drucker told Forbes was “by far the most effective organization in the U.S.”

The donation should have been the tip-off, because the interview ran 48 minutes. Most of the survey asked my opinion of seven high-tech companies: Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, although some questions also “Linux” (or “Open Source”). However, the bulk of the interview — nearly half — was on comparing Google vs. Microsoft vs. IBM.

Having covered political surveys as a newspaper reporter, it only took 10 minutes to identify this as a Microsoft-sponsored survey. One hint was the three way comparison: Google and IBM are major rivals to Microsoft but not to each other. Other hints were the questions that matched Microsoft’s PR campaigns or potential Google criticisms.

I started taking notes about 5 minutes in. The major comparison questions between Google, Microsoft and IBM (in that order) are these questions:

• [paraphrase] Has a technological vision
• [paraphrase] Works well with hardware and software from other companies
• [paraphrase] Is good for the US economy
• Helps the us technology industry succeed
• Gives customers control over the privacy of their information
• Helps people and businesses realized their potential.
• Is a responsible leader
• Is committed to making charitable and social contributions in the US
• Is a company I trust
• Is a technologically innovative company
• Offers products of the highest quality
• Prices its products fairly in the US
• Cares about its customers
• Makes secure products
• Is committed to being a leader in online safety
• Is committed to making secure products
• Its business practices meet the highest standards
• Promotes opportunities for technology skills for underserved populations in the US (senior citizen, disabled)
• Is an agile company
• Is a dynamic company
• Respects the individual property rights of individuals (for example, artists) and companies (e.g. publishers) for use for their content on the Internet
• A company that has access to too much personal information
• A company whose business practices are overly aggressive

In the second part, I was asked:

• What company from the list I most associated with innovation [Apple, of course]
• Any recent news I recall of IBM, Google and Microsoft
• What firms would want with business partnership, and how good the 7 main companies are as partners.
• What a company [like Microsoft] should do to reach out to the SV community
• What technology-related public policy issue is most important [I said interoperability], which brought questions about what about interoperability was important, and asked to rate the 7 main companies on this.
• I was asked to compare open source (“like Linux”) and proprietary code (“like SAP”) as to which one was better: ease of use, increasing global competitiveness of US companies, work well with products of other companies, security, quality, growing the local IT economy, innovation. [“Local” was ambiguous, but to me that implied the user’s country, e.g. India, China, etc.]
• A series of questions about the role of IP as an incentive, the optimal strength of IP for various industries, and whether specific companies’ (RedHat, Sony, Siemens, Microsoft, Google, IBM) approach to IPR “fosters innovation and technology development in the US.”
• Questions about Microsoft’s ads, and corporate citizenship
• Questions about what news sources I follow — newspapers, websites, and bloggers
• Questions confirming my political party and job title (which they had as “business school faculty”

Updated Nov. 14 (Thanks Tom) The list of bloggers must be some sort of badge of honor. The list that I was asked about was (in order) Eric Savitz, Thomas Hawk, Robert Scoble, David Sifry, Tom Foremski, Scott Beale, Kevin Rose, Michael Arrington, John Battelle, Om Malik, Fake Steve Jobs, Valley Wag, and Marc Andreessen. I’d only heard of the last four, although I didn’t know Andressen had a blog and only Malik’s blog has been useful to me in the past.

I’m not sure how I ended up in their sample, nor how they got my phone number. They called me on my GrandCentral number (which is on my most recent business card and my website). This is what Ipsos promises its clients:

It's about understanding and managing issues, and advancing reputations.

We've been doing just that for clients in the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. Every day. …

We provide boutique-style customer service and work closely with our clients while often also undertaking research on a global scale. Clients receive forward-thinking solutions to data collection, innovative use of research technologies, and the strategic insight to evaluate and respond to ever-changing client demands. …

The essence of what we do is help our clients listen to what their audiences are saying, understand what they are thinking and anticipate what they have in mind. We know how best to determine and measure their views and opinions. But we go beyond delivering data. We analyze it, put it in context, and then let our clients know how they can best translate this understanding into efficient and effective policies, programs, communications strategies, and marketing initiatives.

I’m not sure what Microsoft is going to learn from its survey, other than perhaps quantitative measures of Google’s vulnerabilities like privacy and resentment of its march to Total World Domination.

Incompetent gPhone coverage

Rushing to work to give a midterm this morning, I didn't open my paper to see the WSJ previous coverage of the rumored gPhone intro. If I had, I would have seen one of the most inept examples of technology journalism this year in a major publication.

So for my former technology strategy students, what is wrong with this table from page B2 of Monday's WSJ?



C'mon, is it really that hard?

Hint: if "smart" is orthogonal to "open", then is it possible to have all combinations of each dimension? (I.e., "smart"+"open", "smart"+"closed", "dumb"+"open", "dumb"+"closed")

Extra credit option: Dozens of publications have unquestioningly reprinted the Google claim that the gPhone platform "will power thousands of different phone models." So,

1. How many phone models does the world's largest phone maker (Nokia, a non-OHA member) currently sell?
2. How many different cell phone models has the world's most popular "open" cell phone platform (Symbian OS) shipped since its first product in March 1999?
3. If beginning in July 2008, the gPhone platform is used for every new phone model by the two largest OHA members (Samsung and Motorola), how long would it be (at the current rate) before they together had shipped 1000 new models?

gPhone becomes Open Vaporware Alliance

Today Google announced the gPhone. What is it? Yet another version of mobile Linux with yet another trade association —— the Open Handset Alliance — which is led by Google, T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm and Motorola as the major sponsors (in that order according to the press release).

There are so many levels on which I could dissect the announcement, but I still have to keep my day job, so let me mention only a few:

• Motorola is also a member of the LiMo Foundation, Gnome Mobile and other mobile Linux initiatives, but only some of its allies from these initiatives (Intel, DoCoMo, Samsung) are present here.
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt bragged that this is not a mere phone (take that, Apple) but a platform: "Today's announcement is more ambitious than any single 'Google Phone' that the press has been speculating about over the past few weeks. ... Our vision is that the powerful platform we're unveiling will power thousands of different phone models."
• Now we know why Google paid untold billions in July 2005 for Android Inc., the company at the center of Google's new initiative. Co-founders Andy Rubin (who also founded Danger, OS suppliers to Sidekick) and Rich Miner are firm believers in a post-PC world, as evidenced by Miner's quote in the NYT

  "There is a good chance that the number of potential consumers of Google…may never have a PC. ... So one of our clear goals was to find a way and have a platform (to) deliver Google services, Google content and Google search into those markets, and the mobile phone is going to clearly become much more of a development platform."

• With Qualcomm are its two most bitter US rivals, Broadcom and TI, both of whom would like to destroy its business model.
• The Japanese carriers represented include both Qualcomm-loyalist KDDI and nemesis DoCoMo. Among CDMA carriers in the US, Sprint is aboard but Verizon is notably absent. Of the three major European carriers, T-Mobile is present but Vodafone and Orange are missing. Other GSM carriers including China Mobile and (in Europe) Telefonica and Telecom Italia, but not AT&T, the only major US GSM carrier.

There are some reasons for skepticism:

• In addition to the carriers, absent were the major European and Japanese handset makers. In particular, Nokia and Ericsson are firmly committed to the Symbian platform, and even if Google's Web 2.0-enabled vision becomes a reality, can have the best of web- and native-client applications through their existing smartphone investments.
• The fawning pro-Google euphoria was reminiscent of, well, Apple's iPhone roll-out. Even 10 months ago, Steve Jobs did a demo of his vaporware, and all the OHA had to offer today is a phone call. Plans to ship "second half of 2008" puts them 12-18 months behind the iPhone.
• Instead of the fawning headlines, the term "open" should have been used in quotes (but then the reporters don't study open standards for a living). This is another pay to play trade association, and right now it's not clear how open it is (although almost any Linux group is more open than LiMo).

There are other holes in the story. Android co-founder Rubin said "We've created the platform to be open source," but most of the platform components and layers (as far as we can tell) existed long before Google/Android came along. Rubin also claimed that the phone is the ultimate Internet phone:

Our partners will say that the phone does the Internet, in a way other phones don't do the Internet. We don't have to brand it. When you walk into the store and see a phone with lots of Net applications, vs. others with hardly any, people will get it very quickly.

Of course, the iPhone also does the Internet (pretty well) and most of Apple's major rivals plan their own mobile web strategy. A year is a long time, and it's now certain Nokia will be ready. Motorola and Samsung are both Symbian and LiMo participants, so maybe they hope someone will give them a first-class mobile web experience.

Embedded Linux is doing what it does best, which is fragment like crazy: 2007 has brought more fragmentation and not less. Maybe Gnome Mobile was going nowhere (the website looks a little stale), but the joint effort of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo seemed promising both from a business and technical standpoint.