Thursday, February 14, 2013

Opportunity Knocks

Aha.

We see that potential competition is beginning to snap to the fact that an opportunity has opened up in the Android unlocked GSM cell phone market.

Blood is in the water.

The Google has exposed weakness.

Time to pounce?

Sony is considering the possibility.  As are a number of those quick turn-around knock-off cell phone manufacturers from (shh...) China, and oh, Korea.

Heck, they'd be idiots not to have noticed that Google has not even attempted to respond to the thousands of complaints which have surfaced about major flaws in their flagship offering, the Nexus 4.

Cripes!  A business opportunity.

Google sold a phone -- with under-powered Ecommerce servers, no less -- for which they *oopsie doodle*, appear unable to fix critical flaws. The OS and device drivers for that flagship device are broken! What!? Only part of the phone works!?  Which parts?  Well not the WiFi and bluetooth parts, that's for sure. Maybe the HSPA+ parts work, and apparently that's good enough for Google. But see, that leads to the next part just below.

Here it is, this is where opportunity knocks. First, note that the behemoth is paralyzed. Their support infrastructure is a shambles. Big parts of their phone are broken, and Google has demonstrated that they are incapable of addressing those issues. The Google Device Support toll-free hot line staff are still telling people who call in to complain about the phone that the Nexus 4 has no known problems, for fuck's sake.

Now, if we may suggest, is the time to pounce. Snatch that low-end GSM unlocked cell phone market away from The Google before they own it. Lock in to a working, maintainable version of Android, build the phone, and sell it!

Classic Darwinism in action.

All evidence suggests that at the rate Google is progressing towards fixing the now known critical flaws in the Nexus 4 - three months now with no appreciable progress -- an agile competitor could have a functionally equivalent competing working product on the market comfortably before Google has even publicly acknowledged that they have a problem. Which, of course, they have not done yet, because that would be bad for business.

Go for it.  Competition benefits all of us.  Except the ones who can't keep up.

One word of advice, though, to any of those out there considering this opportunity: don't make up little fibs to your customer base, in case problems arise.  They don't like that. It could get ugly if you did. Tell it like it is instead.  That will work.

--Doug

2 comments:

  1. I'm surprised anyone buys android phones at all. Their stuck between a rock and a hard place: If they buy from Google they have your well articulated problems.

    But if they get another handset mfgrs phone, they get no updates .. as far as I know most give you the vanilla android+their device's drivers with little to no upgrades over time.

    cyanogenmod? Er.. sorta proves the point!

    -- Owen

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  2. Point taken, Owen.

    I just rooted my N4, and installed cyanogenmod so that I could make a change to the wifi system driver init file. Getting one hell of an education that I did not necessarily want.

    --Doug

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