[Discuss] Google's Nexus 7

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 3:38 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/10/2012 2:46 PM, Shirley M?rquez D?lcey wrote:
>> 3. Who says that won't be Google's next product?
>
> I say it.
>
> I mentioned Palm previously.  What really killed Palm was the separation of
> software and hardware divisions.  Palm as a whole worked because the
> software and hardware reference implementations were designed and built
> together.  Splitting Palm left the hardware folks without access to a
> developing OS and left the software folks without hardware to run on.
>
> Google is in a similar situation with Android.  They've kept up with
> reference smartphones but until now they haven't had a hardware reference
> for tablets.  That's what Nexus 7 really is.  Like Surface it isn't an
> anything killer.  It's a reference platform, a bar for OEMs, a showcase for
> what Google says an Android tablet should be.

You know that Google just completed their acquisition of Motorola in
late May of this year?  And Google already builds (or at least
designs) their own servers and networking hardware.   This would seem
to at least hold out the possibility of Google doing full
tablet/cellphone designs (hardware + software) entirely in house.
They can then sell the references devices to seed the market as well
as providing designs/help to other manufacturers who want to innovate
off their platform.   Unlike Apple, they have never made money off of
hardware, so undercutting Apple pricing is entirely plausible.

In addition, everybody talks about how well Apple is doing in
smartphones (and they are certainly the largest manufacturer), but on
the OS level Android is double iOS. (I've seen 50% vs. 25% numbers).
Now that Android finally has a version which nominally works well for
both tablets and smartphones, Google comes out with a reference
tablet.   While the smartphone market is different from tablets
(smartphones are subsidized by cell carriers in many markets so the
decision maker is often the cell company rather then the consumer), I
still think Google has a reasonable chance to do the same thing in
tablets that they did with smartphones.

So there is my two cents as well...

Bill Bogstad