Comments on: Dell To Kill Kiosks, May Build Google Phone http://radiomatthew.com/posts/dell-to-kill-kiosks-may-build-google-phone/ Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:15:40 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 By: Tom http://radiomatthew.com/posts/dell-to-kill-kiosks-may-build-google-phone/#comment-560 Tom Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:04:48 +0000 http://radiomatthew.com/blog/dell-to-kill-kiosks-may-build-google-phone/#comment-560 I don’t find the Dell side of this story very interesting to be honest. Dell’s advantage was always that they cut out the middle man and passed the savings along to the customer. In that context the kiosks made sense. Now that everyone has adopted that trick and Dell has been forced to take its place as “yet another vendor on the Best Buy shelf” it no longer makes sense to have their own presence. What I do find interesting is the Google side. The problem Android has is that it’s little more than a joke to most people in the software world. With no phone available or even announced at this point they are forced to offer contest money to small developers in the hopes of creating enough software to get someone interested in this platform. But no serious software developers will touch the thing because there’s no profit to be had. Moreover they are back into a corner because, even though they have tons of cash, they can’t build a phone themselves. If they do they might as well kiss any other vendor goodbye because everyone’s watching them right now. No one’s ever going to build an Android phone until they feel they can trust Google to not enter the market themselves. So if they can parlay Dell’s desperation into an actual phone I say more power to them. I don’t think the Dell phone will be successful or even good really but it will be an actual phone and that’s a start. Microsoft had to deal with having HTC as their only vendor for a long, long time before other companies jumped in but the HTC phones at least gave the platform some credence. You could write a program for the Smartphone platform and then go buy a phone and see it work. Dell could do that for Android and that’s exactly what Google needs right now. I don’t find the Dell side of this story very interesting to be honest. Dell’s advantage was always that they cut out the middle man and passed the savings along to the customer. In that context the kiosks made sense. Now that everyone has adopted that trick and Dell has been forced to take its place as “yet another vendor on the Best Buy shelf” it no longer makes sense to have their own presence.

What I do find interesting is the Google side. The problem Android has is that it’s little more than a joke to most people in the software world. With no phone available or even announced at this point they are forced to offer contest money to small developers in the hopes of creating enough software to get someone interested in this platform. But no serious software developers will touch the thing because there’s no profit to be had.

Moreover they are back into a corner because, even though they have tons of cash, they can’t build a phone themselves. If they do they might as well kiss any other vendor goodbye because everyone’s watching them right now. No one’s ever going to build an Android phone until they feel they can trust Google to not enter the market themselves.

So if they can parlay Dell’s desperation into an actual phone I say more power to them. I don’t think the Dell phone will be successful or even good really but it will be an actual phone and that’s a start. Microsoft had to deal with having HTC as their only vendor for a long, long time before other companies jumped in but the HTC phones at least gave the platform some credence. You could write a program for the Smartphone platform and then go buy a phone and see it work. Dell could do that for Android and that’s exactly what Google needs right now.

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