Broadband Developments

Android is looking like a possible Unified Communications killer. Google is changing the game here. Eric Eldon has a fantastic reporting piece that Android isn’t just for phones.

Some snips from Eric’s piece…“this is where some of Google’s other initiatives could come in, one source speculates. If the wider-ranging operating system is really what Google is doing with Android, well, the App Engine, Google’s web hosting and support service for developers, wouldn’t just be about helping web developers, it would provide services for Android developers. And, Google is also constantly improving the artificial intelligence capacity of its search engine, its spam filtering in Gmail, and a range of other services — Google is creating a supercomputer, driven by artificial intelligence. Through Android, it could let these developers build applications that use its brain. What’s more this could explain why Google has been experimenting with free WiFi in Mountain View (which is pretty great, by the way), and with other wireless transmission experiments. It wants to create an ecosystem that relies on communication between any two devices.”

I’m hearing from my industry friends that Android is more than phone platform. It’s common knowledge that Google is powering their back end with LAMP stacks so it makes so much long term sense to make Android the centerpiece of a bigger competitive strategy - Internet Operating System ..oh yeah Powered By Google.

I’d love to hear Alex Lewis chime in on this topic.

Eric also writes … “Microsoft, meanwhile, has a similarly grand vision of connecting all your devices with its Live Mesh platform, but it isn’t focusing on mobile, and the realization of this goal is a long way off.” …

I would add that their Unified Communications piece is far away too. Ken Camp has been writing about the lack of serious pilots in UC and he’s correct. UC could be a pipe dream with freight trains like Google coming down the track….

Recently I sat down with Eric Swift of Microsoft’s Unified Communications team and asked him directly the Google question...How does Microsoft UC strategy compete with Google’s moves (as a threat to UC). Here is the interview

I am constantly seeing new players moving into what is looking like Unified Communications to me but completely open. I am wondering what IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and others are thinking… they got to be worried. Google has a huge platform and no legacy issues to deal with. It has a clean sheet of paper. If they get the developer community then what we now know as UC vendors ..well they all could be “toast”.

Platform wars continue….