Ring-RingGoogle to Announce Phone Plans Monday
Amol Sharma reports on Google: — We wonÂ't have to wait much longer to hear from Google about its big plans in wireless. The company looks set to make a splash in the mobile market on Monday, announcing an alliance with various handset makers …
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement has been telegraphed for days: last week's question of whether a Google phone can connect with carriers framed the central obstacle, since any hardware or software play lives or dies on carrier cooperation. Monday's event, reported by Amol Sharma, appears to answer it with an alliance of handset makers rather than a Google-branded device.
The timing lands at a peak of confidence: Google's shares crossed $700 on Friday, putting its market value above Cisco, Intel, Apple, and IBM and within reach of Microsoft and General Electric — even as analysts openly debate whether that price reflects value or a bubble. The same week, Google shipped OpenSocial, a developer toolkit aimed at social networks, showing the company already thinks in terms of open platforms rather than closed products.
First-order effects
- The handset makers reportedly joining the alliance gain a Google-backed software stack for their phones, while carriers — the gatekeepers the October 29 story flagged — face a partner that could route around their control of the handset experience.
- Google extends its advertising franchise into mobile, giving advertisers a new inventory channel beyond the search box and AdSense placements it already runs on blogs via FeedBurner.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent mobile operating system vendors — Microsoft among them, whose overall market value Google now nearly matches — are forced to defend handset-software turf against an entrant that can subsidize software with ad revenue rather than license fees.
- If the alliance lowers the cost of smartphone-capable handsets, carriers' subsidy-and-walled-garden economics come under pressure as more capable devices reach the market outside their preferred channels.
Third-order effects
- The move points toward a mobile industry structured around open, ad-funded software platforms rather than carrier-locked devices — a repeat of the developer-toolkit playbook Google just ran with OpenSocial against Facebook's closed network.
- Whether carriers accept or resist this redistribution of power will shape how quickly the phone becomes an open computing platform; the rumored alliance is unconfirmed, and the carriers' posture remains the swing variable.
The trend: Mobile is following the desktop and web arc: value migrating from whoever owns the network pipe to whoever owns the open software platform and its advertising demand.