EkaLore has written about possible strategies Dynamic India could pursue to attain global excellence in key global technology markets. The Smartphone market space is of particular interest because of India’s unique cultural and linguistic environment. This release looks at the background and the strategic choices facing Dynamic India in these markets.
Dynamic India must choose pragmatic strategies to realize the advantages of a gigantic domestic market, strengths in advanced software, and competitiveness in global marketspaces. The strategies chosen must cover hardware, software, ecosystems, and competitive positioning to become prosperous. Not just “successful” as a Dynamic India choosing to invest at the required scale and duration must assure prosperity, not just declared success.
To provide perspective on just how complex and challenging building a new mobile OS let’s look at a few notable efforts (and failures) to do just that.
Background
The place to start examining the requirements for Dynamic India’s long-term project into smart device technologies is to look at the history of some efforts (especially failures).
A caveat – there are many, many, many failures in the development and productization of smartphones. These failures have humbled even the mightiest global enterprises. The following description of these failures offers just a few glimpses of the toil and troubles, and heartache Google and Microsoft faced in their development efforts.
The major vendors spent gigantic sums and sent thousands of workers to attack global marketspaces with hardware, software, business models, and webs of relationships. As a group, the failures were gigantic, often surprising, and provide significant learnings.
Microsoft/Nokia
Microsoft’s attempts to build a Windows-style interface onto a smartphone were ultimately a massive failure. Failures abounded, starting from failing to follow up early leadership in the PDA/device space in 1998 thru the Compaq iPaq in hardware.
In mid-2013, Microsoft purchased the Smart Devices business unit of Nokia. The partnership with Nokia had already resulted in a business line with a 30M device a year run rate. Combined with the Nokia Feature Phone device business, the run rate was 246M devices per year. The Smart Devices unit had more than 32,000 employees on a global scale of employment. The human talent covered product, manufacturing, sales, and all other capabilities needed to run a global business. The senior management talent running a multi-billion revenue enterprise was substantial. On the software and products front Microsoft agreed to pay Nokia for 4-years of ongoing application support of Nokia HereWeGo mapping, navigation, and support operations.
Microsoft also gained three critical assets and sets of rights. Microsoft gained the licensing right to use over 30,000 Nokia Utility Patents (worldwide, including multiple domiciles) for a 10-year period. Microsoft gained outright ownership of ,8500 Nokia Patents. Patent Licenses included the critical license with Qualcomm for using products in Smart Device designs. Critical cross-licenses were gained from IBM, Google Motorola Mobility (Motorola and Lenovo), Motorola Solutions, Apple, LG, Nortel, and Kodak. These patent rights will lapse by the end of 2023.
Microsoft laid off Microsoft Mobile staff in 2016 and ceased development of Windows 10 mobile in 2017.
Microsoft has had multiple opportunities to invest in the smartphone/mobile device market at all stages of technology, product, and business cycles. Most of these investments have been failures (Microsoft Communications Access, Zune, Windows Mobile, Windows 10 Mobile, Nokia, Skype, Groove).
Microsoft’s run at the pocket/mobile device market ran across 20 years and untold billions of dollars, with more than 35,000 active staff at the peak, only to fail.
Google Phones
Google has a long and partly successful history with the handheld device and smartphone business. The smartphone operating system business is wonderfully successful – Android is the dominant smartphone operating system in the marketplace. Other efforts are successful products with slightly different operating system environments – like Chromebooks. Google has launched, continued, weeded out, and pursued projects over decades to reach a dominant market position.
Google Software
In a very rough analogy, the approach for ChromeOS is much like Firefox OS was designed to work. ChromeOS is focused on the Chrome browser, while Firefox OS was designed around the Firefox browser. For these operating systems, the approach to lower-level hardware (such as the Hardware Abstraction Layers, widely available devices like location (GPS) chips or accelerometers, or interface styles (user experience)) and most common functions is distinct between Android, Chrome, and others.
A critical legal and business difference between Android and Chrome is the use of Google Play on Android for the business model (for apps) and trusted distribution mechanism, and downloads available from a number of mechanisms for Chrome. The requirements for hardware are different for ChromeOS machines (such as Chromebooks), leading to very different requirements and implementations for security, devices, and applications management. The differences in requirements also affect choices in hardware costs and how different languages are used by developers in the user interface.
Google Hardware
Google still brings flagship Android smartphones to the market in the Pixel product lines. After purchasing Motorola’s device operations, Motorola pursued many different possible paths to marketplace devices. Ultimately having secured and retained the intellectual property rights and portfolio also protecting the Android efforts the hardware and much of the design groups were sold off to Lenovo. Google tablets and laptops became the Chromebooks and Android Tablet lines with Google as the key software technology stack supplier for hardware manufacturers.
Google spent untold billions pursuing many different opportunities in the smartphone and device marketspaces. Android, ChromeOS, and related Cloud Service investments clearly have gigantic returns for the business models. Advertising, Cloud Services, and future opportunities from a dominant global presence are benefits of gigantic investments.
Our next post will talk about Mobile Phone OS development by other software vendors. Look for it at www.ekalore.com/india-business
You can read the first post in the series here - https://www.ekalore.com/post/dynamic-india-golden-road-to-os
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