Google's Napoleonic Moment | Hacker News Reader

Google's Napoleonic Moment

forbes.com

12 pointsgregpurtell10 comments

It's rather incoherent article.

At one point he claims that few years from now we'll all be buying the cheapest tablets made by asian manufacturers who'll outcompete everyone on price, because "no one cares whose tablet we use as long as it does the basic stuff".

Then he contradicts himself by saying that Microsoft will win the tablet war because of more desirable software. I guess we do care about the software in the tablet after all.

More fundamentally, even if Google totally fails in tablet market, they'll still be making money hand over fist from their web ad business and from their youtube video business.

Google doesn't care about profits from selling hardware that much. I'm sure they would like to make Apple-sized profits but they are strategic enough to sacrifice those profits to defend their ad cash cow.

Low prices are Google's weapon - as long as a tablet runs Android, Google most likely makes money from the person using it so if they could give Android table to everyone for free, they would. Apple and Microsoft don't have that option, they have to sell them at a profit.

I read this mostly as a fluffy piece urging Google to consider targeting the enterprise instead. That's a fine option, if Google had strong integrated business services already. I'm not sure that it does - not at the level of Microsoft, anyway. Consumer is where Google can play the game and where it has a strong foothold, and we've seen that strong consumer penetration gave Apple a strong entrance into the enterprise market (I see a lot of organisations adopting iPads).

I'm not so sure about its claims about Asian manufacturers likely to turn out market-winning low-priced devices, either - I've been considering picking up a made-in-China tablet for a while, and the prices aren't so much better than the Nexus 7's $200 (a dual-core would be $100 or more right now). And as you point out, Google cares about having tablets run Android, not about profiting from the hardware. What are all the Chinese manufacturers loading on their tablets? Android ICS, essentially without exception.

I do think having an official, well integrated keyboard would be very beneficial to the tablet's ecosystem. That's where the Surface wins - I can almost see it as a light laptop replacement. The writer is certainly correct in painting this as important.

Yes, the Surface hardware is intriguing, but the jury's still out on whether their OS will gain acceptance, or seen as a non-cohesive mishmash that won't run many of the popular apps.

Yes agreed. I don't buy the author's argument.

I feel like the historical analogy is more like the Last Days of Empire (British? Roman?). The shift to mobile has left Microsoft behind, and it is desperately trying to stay relevant while iOS and Android become dominant first in consumer use but soon in business use as well.

And there is why you don't take business strategy from random Forbes writers.

* The author took his wife's behaviour and generalized it to represent the entire marketplace. I use the Kindle app on 2 different tablets in preference to my Kobo, and anecdotal evidence is just as relevant as his.

* He claims the copy-catters will beat them both [on price]. As has been previously discussed on HN, Google has priced the Nexus 7 pretty close to cost. No copy-catter is going to going to undercut that with similar features for a while yet.

* "Office is the Microsoft weapon for Surface" The iPad seems to be doing just fine by destroying the Office monopoly in the enterprise.

* "Business apps from Microsoft's parters will be MS's secret weapon." How's that working out for Windows Phone 7?

It's pretty clear the author is a MS fanboy who hasn't accepted the fact that MS has to do a lot of work to remain relevant. An "Enterprise Strategy" is great, but the iPhone showed CIOs back in 2008 that all the strategy in the world is useless when your CEO decides they want an iPhone (or, now, and iPad).

I think the author's biggest failing is that he assumes that just because Google is spending time designing tablets, Google wants to make money selling tablets. He could not be more wrong. The entire Android venture is a defensive play. Google is perfectly happy to pour tens of billions of dollars into Android without seeing any direct revenue from it.

The reason for this is that Google's real core business is still the search advertising. So long as people "google" stuff when they want to find something, Google's future is safe. The walled garden device model is a direct threat to it -- even if the manufacturers never directly block Google, if they make using Bing or whatever easier and more convenient, Google might lose their money press.

So Google makes sure that walled gardens don't win. That's really all they are in for. The Nexus 7 exists because IPad was soundly beating all tablets competitors. All the relevant IP in it has already been distributed to basically everyone who could possibly want it. Google wants it to be cloned.

What a terrible article. If the chap writes the muppet history then that may be worth reading but this managed nothing tangable and is trying to make something out of what it is not. So many assumptions, so many parralels that have no corilation.

Only story here is that the chap got paid to write that, now that is a story!

Worst historical analogy ever. The French invasion of Russia was a massive commitment of resources and therefore failure would be clearly catastrophic. The Nexus 7 is at the most an incremental step in a much larger campaign. More importantly, the goal is to encourage a vigorous and somewhat cohesive ecosystem rather than to become a leading electronics manufacturer.

The author also makes a number of odd statements like "Like Napoleon’s obsession with the resources of Russia, Google continues to fall in love with the potential riches of the consumer market." WTF? Google has been almost entirely focused on reaching the consumer market since day one.

I've always seen Google's "Nexus" line of products as essentially prototypes that Google releases into the market to light a fire under device manufacturers to raise the bar for the latest Android OS.

I would be surprised if Android isn't already nearly the dominant OS for enterprise mobile apps. A cheap, stable tablet is a big win for business, as the iPad is pretty expensive. So who says the Nexus 7 isn't a strategic move toward more of Android in the enterprise market?

Its a sign of times that "leading" magazines publish such crappy articles. the author doesn't have a frigging clue about ad business models - I guess his objective is just to meet the word count.

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