Innovation at Google Part I: Why Google Is Sooooo Interested In Mobile Access
The internet is awash with articles on Google’s prototype cell phone, and Google’s lobbying effort to guarantee open access in the upcoming wireless spectrum auction. Sounds like Google wants to go in the cell phone business. Au contraire. You need but watch this video of Douglas Merrill explaining Google’s innovation philosophies, and it all but jumps out at you:
Google’s mission is to put all the world’s information at everyone’s fingertips, and to create the best search experience possible for its customers. To that end they have a number of problems they need to solve. For instance, searching books and other information not on the web. One of the big problems they identify is mobile internet access. At about the 7:05 mark you see this:
It turns out that there are millions of cell phones in Africa with non-wireline internet access, and a handful of wired access points. If you want all the world’s information to be universally accessible you need to figure out the mobile access problem.
But if you think about it - on a phone, you probably shouldn’t interact the same way you interact on a keyboard. Tri-touch is hard, the screens are very small so pages have to be re-rendered. It’s very complicated. There ought to be something like, maybe, call a phone number, and you speak into it, and you get search results back, so you can choose between them.
Later at 26:30, he shows a map of the world with dots depicting where people have queried Google. Oddly, there are no dots in Africa.
We don’t have users in Africa…fundamentally, what causes the user issues in Africa is very, very bad wireline internet…wireline access in Africa is tightly controlled by the government and heavily taxed. Thus not growing that fast.
In other words, one of Google’s main problems is providing access to information where there is bad/no internet access. Any company whose mission is to provide all information to everyone needs to solve this problem. Clearly, the crown jewel of their solution is to provide mobile access via the open slice of the new bandwidth and a mobile phone optimized for Google searches.
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[...] Experience, Branding, Brand, Innovation, Creativity, Business. trackback Last time I talked about what I think Google’s ultimate goal is for the open wireless spectrum. Today let’s look at the rest of the Douglas Merrill video [...]
[...] time I talked about what I think Google’s ultimate goal is for the open wireless spectrum. Today let’s look at the rest of the Douglas Merrill video [...]
[...] it is. But are they after the same market? As I wrote last year, Google wants open access to let people with bad/no wireline internet to access Google. It’s [...]
[...] it is. But are they after the same market? As I wrote last year, Google wants open access to let people with bad/no wireline internet to access Google. It’s [...]