I rarely see things like this anymore, but oh my what an amazingly well researched story by John Markoff about Andy Rubin at Google.
The article talks about the changing face of the smart phone market and you really get a feel for the history of Mr. Rubin. While the parts about Mr. Rubin’s doorbells and girlfriend dismissal methods are certainly interesting, I found the article to be lacking in one major area – his history of successfully monetizing any of the projects he has worked on in the past.
It is great reading about him as a person though and hope to see people expand on the overlooked area as time goes by.
I found most interesting this comment: “It was like being in grad school,” recalls Mr. Draganic, who worked at General Magic with Mr. Rubin. “We all worked really hard and we bonded, and built the cool things we wanted, but the market wasn’t interested.”
That pretty much sums up engineering ventures and, at least in a lot of my experience, Google.
The market wasn’t interested. Yes, they have some of the smartest minds around but they also have the possibility that what they build will be entirely for themselves, as engineers. Sort of technical auto-erotica. I wish them the best in their efforts to disrupt the mobile business but unless they have a good proposal how they will share the monetization generated by these Google phones, I suspect the uptake of their OS software will be limited. Just like Microsoft struggled to gain a foothold because no handset maker wanted to their business to follow Dell, so too will handset makers (and operators) be apprehensive about giving Goolge license. Google believes there are no barriers to entry because they are Google. We’ll know in two years whether they are correct.