Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Google's Android cellphone software initiative has a precedent in the PC industry. In the beginning were multiple PC operating systems tied to proprietary hardware platforms. One of these decided to make its platform open to any hardware manufacturer, and the inexorable rise of Microsoft had begun.
Of course there are many major differences between the early PC industry and today's cellular telephony market: the mobile industry is many times larger than the PC industry of 30 years ago; there is a much greater diversity of players; there is already a degree of openness, but one parallel stands out: by making its operating system and 'application development platform' available to any hardware manufacturer, Microsoft killed off every all its competitors bar one and went on to dominate almost every aspect of the industry that evolved from those early personal computes.
But in the mobile industry there are already operating systems and application development platforms available to any manufacturer: Microsoft itself and Symbian. Microsoft is not a member of the alliance backing Android. Symbian is owned by Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens and Samsung. Only Samsung which has the smallest shareholding (4.5 percent) has joined the Google initiative.
The biggest questions raised by the announcement of Android are: What's in it for Google?; What role exactly will Google have in the Open Handset Alliance? How much power will it have to influence an organisation made up of so many very powerful players. - a significant number of which compete vigorously with others?
In the announcement, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt said: "This partnership will help unleash the potential of mobile technology for billions of users around the world. A fresh approach to fostering innovation in the mobile industry will help shape a new computing environment that will change the way people access and share information in the future...Our vision is that the powerful platform we're unveiling will power thousands of different phone models."
Google's stated mission is "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." It is already made great strides in this direction. And has achieved enormous power in the market, but with half the world now owing a mobile phone it will not maintain its momentum unless it can dominate that market the way it dominates the fixed Internet market.
At the very least, the Open Handset Alliance will create a 'level playing field' which will give Google a better chance to exploit its strength than one in which the software of arch rival Microsoft grows in presence and power or in which the world leading handset maker, Nokia, exerts greater influence by leveraging its dominance of handset to move into the services market as it is clearly doing.
David Bass
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