With Tablet Plan, Google Goes After Apple and Amazon
Google's long-awaited tablet might finally be on the way to becoming a reality. For at least two years, there have been reports that the search giant was working on something that could compete with Apple's iPad.
Context & Ripple Effects
This story closes a loop that opened in January 2010, when Gizmodo reported HTC working with Google on a Chrome OS tablet, followed by Google starting a tablet version of Chrome OS in April 2011. In February 2012 Andy Rubin publicly pledged to "double down" on Android tablets for the year, and the Wall Street Journal reported the day before this piece that Google would sell tablets under its own brand this year.
The competitive frame matters: Amazon moved first among the challengers with its own tablet plans announced by July 2011, while Apple's iPad still defines the category. That Google's tablet news drew same-day pickup from InfoWorld, Wired, Computerworld, Digits and others shows how much weight the market puts on Google finally entering hardware directly.
First-order effects
- Google shifts from supplying Android to other manufacturers toward selling its own tablet, putting it in direct product competition with Apple's iPad and Amazon's tablet on price and distribution.
- Apple and Amazon now face a competitor that controls both the operating system and the storefront, changing what each must counter in their own device roadmaps.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's content-and-commerce tablet model pressures Google to match an ecosystem play — media, apps and services bundled with cheap hardware — rather than compete on specs alone.
- Android hardware partners lose exclusivity on the OS relationship, since Google now ranks as both their supplier and their competitor at retail.
Third-order effects
- If Google sustains the direct-hardware move, the tablet market consolidates around vertically integrated players — Apple, Amazon, Google — squeezing out licensees who depend on someone else's OS.
- The pattern points toward platform owners treating hardware as a distribution channel for services, with margins made on content and commerce rather than the device itself.
The trend: Tablet computing is consolidating around vertically integrated ecosystem owners, with Google following Apple's and Amazon's path from software and services into selling its own hardware.