The absolute brilliance of Google's Android strategy

Watching the flood of news from Mobile World Congress this week, it struck me that Android may be the smartest thing that Google has ever done. And Google didn't even have a booth at the show.

When Google bought Rubin's startup way back in 2005, the company was worried about proprietary mobile platforms dominating the mobile space, and locking out future opportunities for Google to distribute services -- and more important, sell ads -- on devices like smartphones. Ironically, the platform Google was worried about was Microsoft's Windows Mobile, as the iPhone was but a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye at that point. 

But the important part was the strategy.

The Google version of Android was announced in 2007 as the cornerstone of the Open Mobile Alliance, a group of partners that included Google plus a bunch of hardware makers and some carriers. The key is that first word: Open.

This is an incredibly loaded word, with different meanings to different people, and arouses a lot of fervor and passion from folks who think commercial software is generally inferior, immoral, or both. In Android's case, there are enough angels dancing on the heads of pins (patents, Java, the Skyhook case, Motorola) to keep everybody arguing about "open" for the next decade.

But whenever I hear the word "open" from a commercial company, the first question I ask is "what are they trying to commoditize?" 

The "open" commoditization strategy runs like so:

• Undercut the competitor's business by giving a good-enough equivalent away for free.

• Enable fast improvement and unexpected uses by releasing at least some of the technical underpinnings to the world at large and allowing them to modify the platform for their own uses

IBM tried to commoditize Windows with its support of Linux in the early 2000s. I have argued that Facebook is trying to commoditize Google's datacenter advantage with the Open Compute Project.

But Google's commoditization of the market for commercial smartphone platforms is the most successful example the world has ever seen.

Android went from one of Google's many pilot projects in 2007 to become the top smartphone platform in the world by 2010. Commercial platforms like Windows Phone are struggling because Android turned the mobile device operating system into a commodity. Newer platforms like Firefox OS and Tizen don't have a chance. Who needs another open platform when there's already such a huge ecosystem built around Android?

Even more impressive, Android did this even though the smartphone market was essentially created by another company: Apple.

It would be foolish to downplay Apple's success. This is not an either-or game -- both Google and Apple are winning, and Apple is capturing the vast majority of profits in the smartphone business.

But Apple does this by offering a totally planned and integrated experience from start to finish -- from the moment you walk into the store, through opening the box, setting the phone up, using it every day, buying and installing apps, and everything else -- focusing exclusively on the consumer experience all the way through. (Former Microsoft Windows Phone GM Charlie Kindel pointed this out quite eloquently last week.)

The value is in the whole package. The platform, iOS, only serves that larger mission.

Android, meanwhile, is faced with all sorts of problems. There's fragmentation -- device makers put Android on devices with different screen sizes and processors, and carriers don't update their phones with the latest versions in a timely fashion, which means that developers have to do extra work to target all these different devices, or leave users hanging. Most Android smartphone vendors, with the notable exception of Samsung, are not making a lot of money selling the phones. There's the Amazon Kindle play, where a competitor takes the underlying Android kernel and customizes it, removing all links to Google services and replacing them with its own services, depriving Google of any hope of making money from the sale.
But from Google's perspective, it doesn't matter. The goal was simply to prevent any single commercial platform from dominating the mobile space and blocking Google entirely. Now, that's never going to happen.
The beauty of the "open" Android approach, shown at MWC this week, is that Google has an army of partners racing as fast as they can to fill every conceivable gap left by Apple, BlackBerry, and any other commercial phone vendor.
Android isn't secure enough to displace the BlackBerry in security-conscious organizations? Samsung is tackling that angle with SAFE and KNOX.
Workers need cheap special-function devices to replace the old embedded devices they used to have? American Airlines showed how it could be done with locked-down Galaxy Notes, and HP's $169 Android tablet seems tailor-made for such uses.
Consumers don't want to carry both a tablet and a phone? Fine -- that's where Android "phablets" come in.
Need more innovation? How about a dual-screen phone? Or a phone with a week's worth of battery life?
And if, for some reason, Android partners ever stop innovating to Google's satisfaction (as happened in PC business prior to Windows 8 and Microsoft Surface), Google has its own hardware company -- Motorola -- to drive innovation forward. It cost $12 billion, but subtract out the value of the patents to protect the broader ecosystem, and that looks like a pretty cheap price to pay for a big stick.
Andy Rubin may be worried about Samsung's growing dominance, as a Wall Street Journal report claimed this week, but he shouldn't lose too much sleep. Just as the "open" Android strategy helped it stop the iPhone from taking over the world, it will help beat back any other threat as well.
And meanwhile, if anybody ever figures out how to make big bucks off mobile advertising, it'll be Google.