7 ms·

Yet another example of how what looks later as a slam dunk / sure winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the process. Also, not sure if i

Yet another example of how what looks later as a slam dunk / sure winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the process. Also, not sure if it's covered elsewhere in the book, but it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google.

samizdis 5y ago
> ... what looks later as a slam dunk / sure winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the process Exactly. > ... it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google. That's sort of hinted at in the article: When Android met with Google, Larry Page observed that it would make sense for Google to acquire the small company, to help them build a platform that would enable Google to enter the mobile market. Perhaps we all need to buy the book to find out ...
jcun4128 5y ago
Somewhat related, I heard an interesting podcast recently by Corecursive about Sqlite and they mentioned how Android was so far ahead... excerpt: > This was back in 2005 or so, and we were in meetings with Android, and this was before Android was a thing... they had a prototype of their Android phone, and this was before iPhone... but we were debugging something with SQLite and we were plugging into the phone and we were running the debugger on a workstation which was pretty amazing. Nobody else could do that... here we were, we were debugging an application in GDB on a phone that was on the public network, and this was utterly mind blowing. Nobody at Motorola, nobody at Symbian, nobody at Nokia had anything close to that, and in that one moment, I knew that Android was going to be huge.
- cpeterso 5y ago
  Here's the podcast and a transcription: "The Untold Story of SQLite" https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/ https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  Which is a ridiculous assertion, since I clearly remember running gdb targetting a Handspring/Palm way before the ARM transition, late 90s or the like. In fact m68k gdb was the only option available if you couldn't pay the big compilers. Damn gdbpanel. Not to mention that in 2005 Nokia already had the 770, which was basically a mobile desktop GNU/Linux device, with Gtk+, Gnome and everything. You could run gdb on the device itself.
  - jsjohnst 5y ago
    > Which is a ridiculous assertion To the person who made the claim, it was the first, because of their limited view of the world. I always take claims of being first with a grain of salt for this reason. That said, I completely agree. I definitely used remote debuggers and on-device debuggers on mobile before Android/iOS existed.
    - cat199 5y ago
      > To the person who made the claim, it was the first, because of their limited view of the world. Then one would say 'it was the first i've seen' We have language for a reason. Despite what you hear on daytime talk shows about 'your truth', back in reality, actual truth is objective
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        Isn't that what everyone is saying. To say otherwise would mean you have a perfect understanding of something static. It is the first they know about. It may be defined differently. You cannot claim absolute truth on most things you can't can't claim absolute understanding of the language people use to express things. If you expect absolute truth in a variable world you're in for disappoinment.
6510 5y ago
I don't get why investors would have doubted that all it took is money after Microsoft made Windows such a success looong before. I also cant think of any motivation for google bigger than their competition with MS.
- thepangolino 5y ago
  Worked so well for windows mobile !
  - 6510 5y ago
    Greed is overwhelming in MS. Its success made it into a very different company. In hindsight the camera OS was also a brilliant idea. I primarily use my phone to take pictures, make calls and send text messages. SMS can do that well enough.
lawrenceyan 5y ago
Definitely give Losing the Signal - The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry[0] a read if you're interested in the genesis of mobile. In many ways Google was actually late in comparison to Apple, but was able to leapfrog the ecosystem by focusing on abstracting to the operating system platform/layer that is Android. This is also why I personally believe Microsoft failed but Google was ultimately able to succeed in competition with Apple. [0]: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Losing_the_Signal/oE-TBQAAQBAJ https://www.google.com/books/edition/Losing_the_Signal/oE-TB...
- avh02 5y ago
  definitely taking a look at this book - spent a short part of my career as a blackberry OS developer - worst dev experience of my life, so I'm glad they're dying a slow and excruciating death for it.
  - vnorilo 5y ago
    Maybe BB saved you from Symbian though?
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      MeeGo ended up being not too bad, it used Qt. https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1356777281188937728 https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/13567772811889377...
      - Mikeb85 5y ago
        It was probably the best phone OS at that point in time. It was just a little too late for Nokia and they disastrously threw their lot in with Microsoft.
      - joecool1029 5y ago
        It's funny that BB10 was in many ways similar to MeeGo, it also used Qt/QML and had a similar UI. I went to BB10 after wanting the next closest thing to the Nokia N9 I had before.
GeekyBear 5y ago
The interesting thing is that the company Google feared might push them out on mobile was Microsoft. >Google worried that if Microsoft made it hard enough to use Google search on its mobile devices and easy enough to use Microsoft search, many users would just switch search engines. This was the way Microsoft killed Netscape with Internet Explorer in the 1990s. If users stopped using Google’s search engine and began using a competitor’s such as Microsoft’s, Google’s business would quickly run aground. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-google-had-to-start-over-on-android/282479/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
- ksec 5y ago
  That was the era when everyone thought Microsoft was un- defeatable. Including myself. Little did I know how Microsoft was totally incapable to execute anything. Windows Mobile ( Or heck Pocket PC ) was there years before Android was even founded. And Bill Gate blame it on Anti-Trust and monopoly lawsuit against them.
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    Yea he blamed it on antitrust lawsuit and said that Microsoft lost $400bn because of missed mobile OS opportunity or in another words because Android beat Microsoft and its Windows Mobile/Phone.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      I suppose the antitrust stuff might simply have been too big of a distraction to allow enough focus on early mobile platforms like the Pocket PC, which could have been a much bigger competitor to Palm than it actually was. But that still really would be the antitrust suits themselves since 1) MS got themselves into that mess in the first place and 2) Bill Gates shouldn't have let it distract him so much from potentially vital projects. 3) employee accounts of the internal politics at the time pretty much meant that most new products were doomed to fail from the outset if management on the Windows teams thought they were even the least bit of threat to them.
mrkramer 5y ago
>it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal Motivation was that Microsoft at the time was developing Windows Mobile or whatever it was called and Google got scared that they will put Microsoft Bing as a default internet search engine on millions of Windows Mobile phones that were suppose to conquer mobile phone industry. It's funny how Steve Jobs was mad at Google because Android was chipping away Iphone's dominance but in the reality Android was about and against Microsoft not Apple and Iphone. Search for an article on HN or Google I can't find it atm. But the article talks about just like I said how Google was developing competition for Windows Mobile then famous 2007 Iphone presentation happened and Google engineers realized touch UI and UX is the future not QWERTY plastic keyboard and then they pretty much copied most of the Iphone and iOS features. Edit: here is the article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-google-had-to-start-over-on-android/282479/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...
contingencies 5y ago
I worked in mobile video in 2009-2010 and was chummy with our CEO who was hobnobbing with all the mobile device manufacturer executives. We did headline work for HTC, LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, etc. and sold to HTC in late 2010. The way he explained it, the mobile phone industry in many markets, particularly the US, used to be such that the customer was owned by the carrier. iPhone changed the status quo in 2007: Apple could pick and choose carriers on their terms, the smartphone class device became a primary network interface for the customer, and the customer was effectively owned by the device manufacturer. This was a huge threat to Google, but also the carriers. Android launched in 2009 as Google's hugely successful ally in their response to commodify their complement. Google politically aligned themselves with carriers and the status quo and maintained a 'half-open' rapid-change policy which has created constant API and language churn. Great potential futures from recent smartphone history like Samsung Dex (phone-based dockable Linux workstations), wireless mesh networking as a first-class connectivity paradigm and standards-based IOT control never had a chance to mature. By now we could be running UUCPesque media feeds over local ad-hoc wifi with free educational resources, reliable dockable workstations in our pocket and a self-organizing community economy rewarding social and environmental values. Instead we pay for VPNs and watch TikTok while our right to repair, understand or modify are wholly eroded under the auspices of an "open" platform shepherded by well-paid corporate lawyers and doublespeak. The phone industry is absolutely terrible now. It's like a conspiracy against society focused on capturing consumer attention, surveilling consumers, using them as intelligence nodes for building global wireless infrastructure maps and media OSINT and actively preventing off-carrier cooperation among the population. We desperately need open mobile hardware.
- oblio 5y ago
  > We desperately need open mobile hardware. There's no money in it. It's dead on arrival. I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
  - contingencies 5y ago
    Yes, it's easy to say it will never work. I believe if we commodify the hardware, like the PC era, then we can create a platform which is both cheap to innovate for, more environmentally sustainable and more commercially competitive. It can work. A commercial challenge is that everyone wants the slim integrated thing as a faux-fashion accessory and there's significant costs and there are power and waterproofing concerns with mobile hardware which are technically more difficult to guarantee with a modular architecture. OTOH, as consumers increasingly demand a right to repair and get sick of forking out for the same phones with slightly better specs every 2 years, it might just begin to work out...
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
Also left out in the content was how far Larry & Co were privy to iOS development and that they realized the existential threat if they don't get into the mobile market. Anyways, Those who appreciate the openness of Android it seems like Brian Swetland[1] is the MVP in that regard. >From Korea, the team flew to Taiwan, where they met with the CEO of HTC, Peter Chou. Nick remembered the meeting: “Peter mentioned something about exclusivity for our first device, which Brian overheard. By the time we got back to our hotel room, Swetland had threatened to resign because ‘I didn’t join Android to become another Danger.’ I was concerned because Brian was so critical to our success, but when I saw him the next day everything was fine.” >(Swetland said, “I don’t recall the discussion, but certainly believe it could have happened.” His memory of Danger was fresh and strong at that time. The dynamic at Danger of being beholden to the carrier and manufacturer for product decisions was not something he wanted to repeat. He was strongly in favor of Android’s vision for an open and independent platform. He threatened to resign several times during his time on the Android team over decisions that would have resulted in a closed platform.) [1] https://twitter.com/dnaltews https://twitter.com/dnaltews

samizdis 5y ago

> ... what looks later as a slam dunk / sure winner acquisition is anything but for those involved during the process Exactly. > ... it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal. My understanding is that Google understood mobile was important and given that, at the time, network operators had a lot of control over mobile software, the fear was that they could control access to the search engine and, hence, exclude or take control over Google. That's sort of hinted at in the article: When Android met with Google, Larry Page observed that it would make sense for Google to acquire the small company, to help them build a platform that would enable Google to enter the mobile market. Perhaps we all need to buy the book to find out ...

jcun4128 5y ago

Somewhat related, I heard an interesting podcast recently by Corecursive about Sqlite and they mentioned how Android was so far ahead... excerpt: > This was back in 2005 or so, and we were in meetings with Android, and this was before Android was a thing... they had a prototype of their Android phone, and this was before iPhone... but we were debugging something with SQLite and we were plugging into the phone and we were running the debugger on a workstation which was pretty amazing. Nobody else could do that... here we were, we were debugging an application in GDB on a phone that was on the public network, and this was utterly mind blowing. Nobody at Motorola, nobody at Symbian, nobody at Nokia had anything close to that, and in that one moment, I knew that Android was going to be huge.

cpeterso 5y ago
Here's the podcast and a transcription: "The Untold Story of SQLite" https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/ https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
AshamedCaptain 5y ago
Which is a ridiculous assertion, since I clearly remember running gdb targetting a Handspring/Palm way before the ARM transition, late 90s or the like. In fact m68k gdb was the only option available if you couldn't pay the big compilers. Damn gdbpanel. Not to mention that in 2005 Nokia already had the 770, which was basically a mobile desktop GNU/Linux device, with Gtk+, Gnome and everything. You could run gdb on the device itself.
- jsjohnst 5y ago
  > Which is a ridiculous assertion To the person who made the claim, it was the first, because of their limited view of the world. I always take claims of being first with a grain of salt for this reason. That said, I completely agree. I definitely used remote debuggers and on-device debuggers on mobile before Android/iOS existed.
  - cat199 5y ago
    > To the person who made the claim, it was the first, because of their limited view of the world. Then one would say 'it was the first i've seen' We have language for a reason. Despite what you hear on daytime talk shows about 'your truth', back in reality, actual truth is objective
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Isn't that what everyone is saying. To say otherwise would mean you have a perfect understanding of something static. It is the first they know about. It may be defined differently. You cannot claim absolute truth on most things you can't can't claim absolute understanding of the language people use to express things. If you expect absolute truth in a variable world you're in for disappoinment.

6510 5y ago

I don't get why investors would have doubted that all it took is money after Microsoft made Windows such a success looong before. I also cant think of any motivation for google bigger than their competition with MS.

thepangolino 5y ago
Worked so well for windows mobile !
- 6510 5y ago
  Greed is overwhelming in MS. Its success made it into a very different company. In hindsight the camera OS was also a brilliant idea. I primarily use my phone to take pictures, make calls and send text messages. SMS can do that well enough.

lawrenceyan 5y ago

Definitely give Losing the Signal - The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry[0] a read if you're interested in the genesis of mobile. In many ways Google was actually late in comparison to Apple, but was able to leapfrog the ecosystem by focusing on abstracting to the operating system platform/layer that is Android. This is also why I personally believe Microsoft failed but Google was ultimately able to succeed in competition with Apple. [0]: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Losing_the_Signal/oE-TBQAAQBAJ https://www.google.com/books/edition/Losing_the_Signal/oE-TB...

avh02 5y ago
definitely taking a look at this book - spent a short part of my career as a blackberry OS developer - worst dev experience of my life, so I'm glad they're dying a slow and excruciating death for it.
- vnorilo 5y ago
  Maybe BB saved you from Symbian though?
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    MeeGo ended up being not too bad, it used Qt. https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1356777281188937728 https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/13567772811889377...
    - Mikeb85 5y ago
      It was probably the best phone OS at that point in time. It was just a little too late for Nokia and they disastrously threw their lot in with Microsoft.
    - joecool1029 5y ago
      It's funny that BB10 was in many ways similar to MeeGo, it also used Qt/QML and had a similar UI. I went to BB10 after wanting the next closest thing to the Nokia N9 I had before.

GeekyBear 5y ago

The interesting thing is that the company Google feared might push them out on mobile was Microsoft. >Google worried that if Microsoft made it hard enough to use Google search on its mobile devices and easy enough to use Microsoft search, many users would just switch search engines. This was the way Microsoft killed Netscape with Internet Explorer in the 1990s. If users stopped using Google’s search engine and began using a competitor’s such as Microsoft’s, Google’s business would quickly run aground. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-google-had-to-start-over-on-android/282479/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...

ksec 5y ago
That was the era when everyone thought Microsoft was un- defeatable. Including myself. Little did I know how Microsoft was totally incapable to execute anything. Windows Mobile ( Or heck Pocket PC ) was there years before Android was even founded. And Bill Gate blame it on Anti-Trust and monopoly lawsuit against them.
- mrkramer 5y ago
  Yea he blamed it on antitrust lawsuit and said that Microsoft lost $400bn because of missed mobile OS opportunity or in another words because Android beat Microsoft and its Windows Mobile/Phone.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I suppose the antitrust stuff might simply have been too big of a distraction to allow enough focus on early mobile platforms like the Pocket PC, which could have been a much bigger competitor to Palm than it actually was. But that still really would be the antitrust suits themselves since 1) MS got themselves into that mess in the first place and 2) Bill Gates shouldn't have let it distract him so much from potentially vital projects. 3) employee accounts of the internal politics at the time pretty much meant that most new products were doomed to fail from the outset if management on the Windows teams thought they were even the least bit of threat to them.

mrkramer 5y ago

>it would've been interesting to get to understand Google's motivation for doing this deal Motivation was that Microsoft at the time was developing Windows Mobile or whatever it was called and Google got scared that they will put Microsoft Bing as a default internet search engine on millions of Windows Mobile phones that were suppose to conquer mobile phone industry. It's funny how Steve Jobs was mad at Google because Android was chipping away Iphone's dominance but in the reality Android was about and against Microsoft not Apple and Iphone. Search for an article on HN or Google I can't find it atm. But the article talks about just like I said how Google was developing competition for Windows Mobile then famous 2007 Iphone presentation happened and Google engineers realized touch UI and UX is the future not QWERTY plastic keyboard and then they pretty much copied most of the Iphone and iOS features. Edit: here is the article: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-google-had-to-start-over-on-android/282479/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...

contingencies 5y ago

I worked in mobile video in 2009-2010 and was chummy with our CEO who was hobnobbing with all the mobile device manufacturer executives. We did headline work for HTC, LG, Nokia, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson, etc. and sold to HTC in late 2010. The way he explained it, the mobile phone industry in many markets, particularly the US, used to be such that the customer was owned by the carrier. iPhone changed the status quo in 2007: Apple could pick and choose carriers on their terms, the smartphone class device became a primary network interface for the customer, and the customer was effectively owned by the device manufacturer. This was a huge threat to Google, but also the carriers. Android launched in 2009 as Google's hugely successful ally in their response to commodify their complement. Google politically aligned themselves with carriers and the status quo and maintained a 'half-open' rapid-change policy which has created constant API and language churn. Great potential futures from recent smartphone history like Samsung Dex (phone-based dockable Linux workstations), wireless mesh networking as a first-class connectivity paradigm and standards-based IOT control never had a chance to mature. By now we could be running UUCPesque media feeds over local ad-hoc wifi with free educational resources, reliable dockable workstations in our pocket and a self-organizing community economy rewarding social and environmental values. Instead we pay for VPNs and watch TikTok while our right to repair, understand or modify are wholly eroded under the auspices of an "open" platform shepherded by well-paid corporate lawyers and doublespeak. The phone industry is absolutely terrible now. It's like a conspiracy against society focused on capturing consumer attention, surveilling consumers, using them as intelligence nodes for building global wireless infrastructure maps and media OSINT and actively preventing off-carrier cooperation among the population. We desperately need open mobile hardware.

oblio 5y ago
> We desperately need open mobile hardware. There's no money in it. It's dead on arrival. I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
- contingencies 5y ago
  Yes, it's easy to say it will never work. I believe if we commodify the hardware, like the PC era, then we can create a platform which is both cheap to innovate for, more environmentally sustainable and more commercially competitive. It can work. A commercial challenge is that everyone wants the slim integrated thing as a faux-fashion accessory and there's significant costs and there are power and waterproofing concerns with mobile hardware which are technically more difficult to guarantee with a modular architecture. OTOH, as consumers increasingly demand a right to repair and get sick of forking out for the same phones with slightly better specs every 2 years, it might just begin to work out...

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

Also left out in the content was how far Larry & Co were privy to iOS development and that they realized the existential threat if they don't get into the mobile market. Anyways, Those who appreciate the openness of Android it seems like Brian Swetland[1] is the MVP in that regard. >From Korea, the team flew to Taiwan, where they met with the CEO of HTC, Peter Chou. Nick remembered the meeting: “Peter mentioned something about exclusivity for our first device, which Brian overheard. By the time we got back to our hotel room, Swetland had threatened to resign because ‘I didn’t join Android to become another Danger.’ I was concerned because Brian was so critical to our success, but when I saw him the next day everything was fine.” >(Swetland said, “I don’t recall the discussion, but certainly believe it could have happened.” His memory of Danger was fresh and strong at that time. The dynamic at Danger of being beholden to the carrier and manufacturer for product decisions was not something he wanted to repeat. He was strongly in favor of Android’s vision for an open and independent platform. He threatened to resign several times during his time on the Android team over decisions that would have resulted in a closed platform.) [1] https://twitter.com/dnaltews https://twitter.com/dnaltews