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Tipping Points and The Future of Electronics
I'm convinced that you are going to see a resurgence in Western entrepreneurial activity in hardware, and it's all due to Android's supposed fragmentation.
For the last 20+ years, developing hardware in the West has been a challenge. Android is poised to break that trend. To understand why, it's helpful to take a look at the history of the PC. Others have drawn parallels between today and the early 1980's in the PC's evolution, but the discussion is often focused on the religious war between Android and Apple. But that view is missing the point.
In the early 80's, the personal computer diverged into two different camps: IBM's and Apple's. Both effectively resulted in the opening of the closed word processors, but Apple's strategy was vertical integration, whereas IBM — mostly by accident — followed a more open approach. Much has been discussed about the fact that IBM outsourced the operating system of the PC, most famously to Microsoft; less, perhaps, about the significance of IBM's off-the-shelf hardware.
The existence of open standards then, as now, was not new. IBM's decision to use off-the-shelf components meant it didn't need to invest in creating new standards, technically superior or no; instead, by using existing standards, it pushed their rate of adoption past a tipping point. This kicked off plenty of entrepreneurial activity, both among hardware and application developers. Once IBM adopted an architecture that others could plug into, it allowed entrepreneurs to focus on one small piece of an emerging supply chain, without removing the potential to expand their role as they grew.
As more and more entrepreneurs raced into this ecosystem it started a reinforcing cycle: new hardware added features and drove down costs. This in turn, attracted more application developers, integrators and PC companies. Within a few short years, developing a PC — which used to cost millions — became something Michael Dell could do in a dorm room. Throughout the entire supply chain, barriers to entry were eliminated, and entrepreneurs entered the industry in force, driving the greatest explosion of innovation and creativity in the history of man.
The App Store Revolution
It was possible to create apps — or whatever they were called — before the App Store. Apple made it practical. They pushed apps past the tipping point.
Cloning is the most sincere form of product development
Even more importantly, instead of having to deal with a distended and largely opaque supply chain buried in China's hinterlands, our entrepreneur has a single point of contact who manages the whole thing, who has already negotiated pricing, terms, quality, inventory management and such. Now, finished goods coming out of Asia are nothing new. What's new is that the finished goods, in this case, are built on an open platform that allows customization at a variety of levels. A closed MP3 player doesn't provide much opportunity for an innovator regardless of how perfect the price or hardware otherwise is, whereas an Android device, even if imperfectly spec'd, can provide a world of opportunity to that innovator. In fact, it is this seemingly subtle difference that I believe will reverse the trend of the last 20 years which has stymied western innovation in electronics. The hypothetical closed MP3 player above not only didn't help the innovator, it hurt them. Sure, most of the innovators used Asian manufacturing, at least ultimately, but that's only one piece of the equation. To understand this distinction, we'll have to rewind thirty years.
Innovators Working With Asian Manufacturers Instead of Competing Against Them
Virtually overnight, new innovators, most without even realizing it, will wake to find that the Asian design infrastructure, the bane of innovators for 20+ years, has suddenly become an asset (at least in certain categories). Android as a platform has now dramatically reduced the link that produced the "as manufacturing goes overseas, so will design" axiom. Dell has happily demonstrated this is possible in PCs, and I believe that with Android we have a real shot at bringing the innovation and entrepreneurship back to US shores in electronics.
This is not a new idea
These lessons can be gleaned easily from the PC trends in the 80's, which leads one to wonder why it took so long for this to happen. The Linux kernel itself certainly swept through the embedded systems market years ago, and it's the de facto choice for small-run hardware designs (and a lot of big-run ones, too), but no good platform, spanning all the way from system libraries to user interface, has ever taken hold of the electronics industry before Android.
But that's beside the point, which is this: saying that Android is fragmented as a phone platform by comparing it to the iPhone is like saying the iPhone App Store is closed by comparing it to the PC. It's the wrong comparison. Instead, think of it this way:
Android is the most unified electronics device platform in the industry's history.
The fact that so many vendors have been taking Android and sticking it in places where Google didn't intend it to go is evidence that the platform is flexible and open enough to support new applications. I'm confident that you'll start seeing Android everywhere — even in places where most of the platform will never be used — because the question engineers are asking now is not "Why would we use Android?", but "Why wouldn't we?" And from there, it's a short wait until Western entrepreneurs discover that their novel ideas are suddenly practical ones.
In fact, don't wait for it. Go out there right now and make something.
Read more at open.neurostechnology.com
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