Nexus One - the bigger picture
Google is an advertising corporation. Their whole business model is predicated on breaking down barriers to access — barriers which stop the public from accessing rich internet content supplemented with Google’s ads. Google want the mobile communications industry to switch to Version 2, pure bandwidth competition. In fact, they’d be happiest if the mobile networks would go away, get out of the users’ faces and hand out free data terminals with unlimited free bandwidth. More bandwidth, more web browsing, more adverts served, more revenue for Google. Simple.
This is where the Nexus One may be significant. If the rumours are true — that they’re pushing it at a low or subsidized price, and have strong-armed T-Mobile (the weakest of the US cellcos) into providing a cheap data-only mobile tariff for it, and more significantly access to VoIP and cheap international data roaming — then they’ve got a Trojan horse into the mobile telephony industry.
The real message here is that if Google succeeds, the economic basis of your mobile telephony service in 2019 is going to be unrecognizably different from that of 2009. What’s good for the internet is good for Google. Right now, the phone companies are not good for the internet. If I’m right about the grand strategy, the Googlephone will change that.
Excerpts from a piece by Charlie Stross
