I’ve Seen Things You People Wouldn’t Believe…

The greater techno-sphere got their col­lec­tive panties in a twist this week­end over the quasi-unveiling of the rumored Google Phone. I’m not going to link to any of the cov­er­age, I’m lazy and you all can use a search engine just fine, but it behooves me as an opin­ion­ated cock-sucker and gen­eral bas­tard to throw in my two cents.

So, what do we know about this bad boy? Basically, it’s a re-branded (or should that be “unbranded”) HTC phone run­ning the lat­est ver­sion of Android. Supposedly it will be offered carrier-unlocked (no word on pri­ce­points) and it works on T-Mobile’s vari­ant of the GSM spec­trum in the U.S. What that means, for those who don’t under­stand the vagaries of cel­lu­lar data net­works (New York Times, I’m look­ing at you) is that it a) won’t be run­ning on your pre­cious fuck­ing Verizon, and b) will only oper­ate at EDGE speeds on AT&T.

My take on this: “So the fuck what?”

The vast mouth-breathing major­ity of the blo­gos­phere is agog with com­ments about how this strap­ping young lad of a phone will “change the indus­try” and other such hyper­bolic twad­dle. The phrase “iPhone killer” has even been bandied about. The thing is, it’s all bull­shit. The cell phone land­scape has already been changed, and the changer’s name was Apple. No one in their right mind (Enderle need not apply) can deny that it was the iPhone that intro­duced the main­stream con­sumer to what a prop­erly exe­cuted smart-phone should be. But again I ask: “So the fuck what?”

The truth is that there is noth­ing excep­tion­ally spe­cial about the iPhone, just as there isn’t any­thing par­tic­u­larly spe­cial about this new Google Phone. Both, along withe the Droid, the Pre and what­ever the hell Blackberry is hawk­ing these days have their strengths and weak­nesses. Buy whichever one works best for you and then shut up about it.

The prob­lem is that the bulk of the tech media doesn’t under­stand the pre­vi­ous para­graph. They are so con­sumed with two huge blind-spots that they have utterly missed the point. Those two blind-spots are Silicon Valley insu­lar­ity and binary thinking.

A huge chunk of the tech media, and the New Media Douchebags that do their think­ing for them, have their heads so far up their Sili Valley asses that they haven’t the fog­gi­est idea what the actual cel­lu­lar phone mar­ket looks like. Here’s a hint: there are vastly more peo­ple out there with “dumb” phones, or no cell phone at all, than there are smart phone users. Will that change? Most likely, but prob­a­bly not in the way that the pun­di­tards think. I sus­pect that, much like with the rest of the con­sumer elec­tron­ics indus­try, the fea­tures that we now con­sider to be emblem­atic of “smart” phones will grad­u­ally become fea­tures that are taken for granted in newer main­stream devices.

To take an exam­ple from an indus­try utterly unre­lated to cell phones, let’s whip up a good old fash­ioned auto indus­try anal­ogy. Specifically, let’s talk GPS. At one time only the swanki­est of lux­ury auto­mo­biles came with an optional GPS nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem. Now they’re being included in many base mod­els. Does that make GPS nav­i­ga­tion any less of a “smart” fea­ture? No, it just shows that, over time, the aver­age con­sumer tends to adopt suc­cess­ful technology.

Another way in which the press seems obliv­i­ous to the real­i­ties sur­round­ing the cel­lu­lar phone mar­ket is the ten­dency to equate the smart phone mar­ket with the per­sonal com­puter mar­ket, where con­sumers have been con­di­tioned to think that there is one maker of PC oper­at­ing sys­tems, with a few alter­na­tives for hip­pies and nerds. Historically the cel­lu­lar phone mar­ket has been much more like the rest of the con­sumer elec­tron­ics mar­ket, with a plethora of brand choices and con­sumers show­ing pre­cious lit­tle loy­alty among the brands.

So, how does this relate to the cel­lu­lar phone mar­ket? Unlike many in the blo­gos­phere who seem to envi­sion a weird, dystopian future where one mono­lithic cor­po­ra­tion dis­penses smart phones to the enlight­ened digerati, I see a future where many of the fea­tures that now epit­o­mize the “smart phone” are present in a wide vari­ety of  devices offered by a num­ber of man­u­fac­tur­ers run­ning a choice of oper­at­ing sys­tems. Among them I def­i­nitely see Android and the iPhone OS, with less con­fi­dence sur­round­ing WebOS and WinMobile.

Which brings us to the sec­ond way in which I think that most pun­dits miss the point: binary think­ing. It seems to be taken as a gospel truth that only one ven­dor can exist in any given mar­ket, even as the same pun­dits lash out at com­pa­nies that choose not to par­tic­i­pate in mar­kets that they don’t see as prof­itable (you can shove your Apple Netbook up your ass).

It’s some­what amus­ing to see writ­ers shift seam­lessly from screech­ing about “monop­o­lies” and “anti-competitive behav­ior” to breath­less screeds about the next “X Killer,” where X is usu­ally the iPhone, Apple, or a game con­sole. Again, these peo­ple are ignor­ing the vast pop­u­la­tion of con­sumer prod­ucts where com­pet­ing brands offer dif­fer­ent prod­ucts, and it all works famously. Has any­one ever seri­ously made a com­ment such as “The new Vizio HDTV is totally a Panasonic killer”? No, they haven’t and if they did they would be laughed at. But some­how, if a device con­nects to a com­puter then we’re liv­ing under Highlander rules.

So, back to the point, the Google Phone, or Nexus One, or what­ever it’s called. Goody on Google. It’s a nice look­ing phone. I’m sure it will be good for Google, it will be good for Apple, and it will be good for the mar­ket as a whole.

Now shut the fuck up about it.