A Wall Street Journal article yesterday described how Android—a mobile phone operating system pushed by Google and more than 30 partners—is encountering some unforeseen difficulties.
These struggles aren’t actually that surprising. Chapters 5 and 6 of The Innovator’s Solution describe how pushing performance boundaries almost always requires that a single company control critical interfaces.
Google its partners are betting they can create a modular mobile phone operating system that anyone can pick up and use. They hope that Android makes it simple and cheap for third-party developers to encourage the use of the Internet on mobile devices, which will result in more advertising revenue for Google.
However, the Android team is still fine-tuning the operating system. Developers report being frustrated because they no sooner optimize an application for Android than the operating system changes. Getting a single Android-powered phone out the door for T-Mobile USA is sucking up almost all of Google’s Android-related resources.
Imagine how different it would be if Google was aggressively pushing its own phone forward (which it very well might be doing behind the scenes).
Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Business blog, Innovation Insights.