Vikram Saxena

Google: Android Skepticism, Plunging Stock

A lot of people in New York do not get Google's business investments; a fund manager on CNBC once questioned why having your own browzer helped Google?

Google operates in a chaotic, hyper-dynamic and nebulous domain. The domain is unique because the distribution, marketing and support costs are significantly less than traditional businesses, even traditional software businesses.

This gives Google the luxury to run a thousand R&D experiments, and expose some of them to the public, with very little incremental cost after the initial development effort. Even if the experiment goes nowhere, it often generates enough ad revenues to justify the investment. But perhaps more significant, by becoming one of the players, Google develops a significantly better understanding of that particular niche. As a result, Google reduces the chance of missing the Next Big Thing; further it gives them the insight on how to monetize that particular domain with their core offering.

The conversion from cell-phones to smart-phones is still in an early phase which opens up opportunities for 2nd-tier hardware vendors to get a leg in. MacOS, and Linux have shown that even in a Windows world, other OSes' too can thrive. Android will never dominate the market; however it will find a place in open-source mobile OSes.