The Herding Of Cats

parislemon:

Tom Krazit gives a good high-level overview of where the Android alliance now stands. The key blurb:

The second is that the humble organization once known as the Open Handset Alliance appears to have no real function. Instead of moving together on new standards as members of technical organizations tend to do, handset makers and carriers continue to dictate the advancement of Android based on their own individual needs, rather than the good of the many.

That’s exactly right. For all the promise of the OHA, it appears now to just be a set of companies committed to one thing alone: making money off of a (sometimes loosely defined) single platform. 

Krazit continues:

When you look back at the original Web site set up by the group back in 2007, it becomes easy to see why: “All members of the Alliance have committed to making the initial version of the platform a commercial success,” the group said in response to the question “What have members of the Alliance committed to?” Now that the commercial success of Android is quite secure, partisan needs appear to taken precedent over the need to convince consumers who have made investments in Android phones that they’ll have access to new features without having to fork over another few hundred bucks to get a whole new phone.

But perhaps the members of the alliance define “commercial success” differently than Krazit does.

Are the companies in good shape in terms of sales and market share? For many of them, the answer is a definite “yes”. But what about in terms of the actual business — you making money? The carriers are doing well in that regard, but of the OEMs, only Samsung and to a lesser extent HTC are doing well (and neither is anywhere close to the kind of business Apple is doing by that metric). 

In my view, that’s why many of the players are dicking around with things like TouchWiz. It’s not about a unified Android for them, it’s about differentiating themselves enough so they can make more money than their rivals. And let’s be clear, all of the companies in the OHA are still rivals. This seems like a fundamental problem, no?

All of this is backchannel fodder that most consumers don’t know about and don’t care to know about. But it still matters for them — I know I would definitely be pissed off if I spent hundreds (and ultimately thousands) of dollars on a device and I can’t get access to the latest updates with the best features.

And to a lesser extent, it would drive me nuts knowing that I was buying a phone that would probably be replaced by a better one in just a few months.  

The point is that all of these companies are doing a great job at selling the promise of Android — but they’re actually doing quite poorly when it comes to delivering on that promise. And that includes Google.

As Krazit points out, without changes, at some point that dream collapses.