Give Andy Rubin, the architect of Google&'s Android mobile operating system, points for honesty in discussing the failure of the company&'s experiment in selling mobile phones directly to consumers.
&''We bit off more than we could chew,&'' said Rubin, in reference to the company&'s move almost a year ago of offering its Nexus One smartphone for sale directly to consumers from its web site, free of ties to a carrier.
The new Nexus S, by contrast, is launching with T-Mobile at a subsidized price of $199 and being sold at Best Buy stores next week. (It&'s also available, unlocked, for $529 &8212' but not directly from Google, as the Nexus One was.)
Unlocked phones are commonly sold in Europe, but in the U.S., carriers subsidize the price of a handset in exchange for forcing consumers to sign long-term service contracts &8212' a tie that Google hoped to break with the introduction of the Nexus One.
What ultimately killed the experiment, Rubin said, wasn&'t pushback from carriers, but the burden of setting up systems to provision phones with wireless service. Google also faced criticism from users when it didn&'t make telephone customer support available at first.
Rubin said Google looked at the length of time it took to set up each connection with a carrier and multiplied that time across the hundreds of carriers in the world and decided it made more sense to spend that time developing new features, like Google&'s recently introduced Gingerbread version of Android.
He made the remarks in San Francisco at D: Dive Into Mobile, a conference organized by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, two veteran tech journalists affiliated with News Corp.
Swisher and Mossberg probed Rubin repeatedly on the question of Android&'s profitability as an arm of Google. &''I bring my accountant with me everywhere I go,&'' cracked Rubin.
Google executives have said Android is profitable if one considers Google&'s sales of advertisements on Android-powered phones.
&''When I was a startup company, there was no way I would be profitable,&'' said Rubin. Before Google bought Android in 2005, the company was planning to give away its software and make money providing development services to carriers.
But Rubin wasn&'t bullish on that plan, he now admits: &''I probably wouldn&'t have made it as a startup company.&''
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Companies: Best Buy, Google, T Mobile
People: Andy Rubin, Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg
Companies: Best Buy, Google, T Mobile
People: Andy Rubin, Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg
Owen Thomas is the executive editor of VentureBeat.
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