Why Android matters
Posted on 2008-11-12 by Eric Raymond

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I’m going to start with the relatively far future, like five or even possibly ten years out, because I’m pretty sure my projections for it are very similar to Sergei and Larry’s and that they are what is actually driving Google’s corporate strategy.

Cellphone descendants are going to eat the PC...

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Now. You are Google. You make your money by selling ads on the most successful search engine in the world. One of your strategic imperatives is therefore this: you cannot allow anyone to operate a technological or regulatory chokepoint between you and people doing searches, otherwise they’ll stunt your earnings growth and siphon off your revenues. That’s why you ran a politico-financial hack on the Federal auction of radio spectrum to ensure a certain minimum level of openness. And that’s why you are [Google is], very quietly, the single most determined and effective advocate of network neutrality. [note Eric is referring to free market driven "net neutrality" not the political lie "net neutrality" which is actually the way to end "net neutrality"]

Now, combine these two visions and you’ll understand why Google is doing Android. Their goal is to create the business conditions that will maximize their ad revenue not just two years out but ten years out. Those business conditions are, basically, an Internet that is as friction-free, cheap, and difficult to lock down as the underlying technology can make it.

Under this strategy, Android wins in multiple ways. In the longer term, it gives Google a strong shot at defining the next generation of dominant computing platforms in such a way that nothing but customer demand will be able to control those platforms.

In the shorter term, it outflanks the Baby Bells. As web traffic shifts to Googlephones (and things like them), telco efforts to double-dip carriage charges by extracting quality-of-service fees from Google and other content providers will become both technologically more difficult and politically impossible. By depriving them of the ability to lock in customers to gated and proprietary services, Android will hammer both the wire-line and wireless telcos into being nothing but low-margin bit-haulage providers, exactly where Google wants them. (A leading indicator will be the collapse of the blatant absurdity that is the ring-tones market, doomed when anyone can hook MP3s of their choosing to phone events.)

As bad as this sounds for the telcos, Microsoft gets outflanked and screwed far worse...

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One of the coolest things about this chain of dominoes is that Google itself doesn’t have to win or end up with control of anything for the future to play out as described. It’s not even necessary that Android itself be the eventual dominant cellphone platform. All they have to do is force the competitive conditions so that whatever does end up dominating is as open as Android is. Given that one of the largest handset makers is already being forced to open source their stack for other reasons (Nokia figured out that they can’t afford to hire enough developers to do all their device ports in-house) this outcome seems certain.

For the open-source community, it’s all good. The things Google needs to do with Android for selfish business-strategic reasons are exactly what we want, too. This isn’t an accident, because we’re both pulling in the direction of reducing the effects of market friction, transaction costs, and asymmetries of power and information. If Google didn’t exist, the open-source community would need to invent it.

Oh. Wait. We did invent them. Where do you suppose Sergei and Larry came from? Why do you suppose they’ve been running Summer of Code and hiring a noticeable fraction of the most capable open-source developers on the planet? Well, here’s a flare-lit clue: before those two guys [Sergei and Larry Page] were famous, they sent me fan mail once.

That’s why I think those two know exactly what they’re doing. And that, if it’s true that their business strategy requires them to be open source’s ally, I think I can be allowed a guess that they chose their business strategy so that would be true. “Don’t be evil”; they’re not angels, but they’re trying.

And, from where I sit? All I can say is this: Bwahahaha. The sinister master plan for world domination – it is working!

You can do whatever you please. I'm backing the side that's the most right.

Those who can’t build, talk
Posted on 2011-07-28 by Eric Raymond   

One of the side-effects of using Google+ is that I’m getting exposed to a kind of writing I usually avoid – ponderous divagations on how the Internet should be and the meaning of it all written by people who’ve never gotten their hands dirty actually making it work. No, I’m not talking about users – I don’t mind listening to those. I’m talking about punditry about the Internet, especially the kind full of grand prescriptive visions. The more I see of this, the more it irritates the crap out of me. But I’m not in the habit of writing in public about merely personal complaints; there’s a broader cultural problem here that needs to be aired.