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Verizon Might Deliver Google Phone
MrCrassic writes "There are talks floating around surrounding Google's possible talks with Verizon and possibly T-Mobile to establish an agreement for the carrier to deliver phones carrying Google's speculated mobile operating system.
According to the article, one of the main hurdles slowing down the product are concerns about user privacy and advertising, one of Google's well-renowned strengths. With over 6 million customers potentially at their disposal, could this be "the deal" that establishes Google's hegemony in the internet sphere?"
What's taking so long? Google and Verizon please hurry up and introduce a sleek new phone to compete with the iPhone so my wife will stop nagging me to pay the early termination fee on her verizon contract. It's in all our best interests a true win/win/win.
Reading the article, all accounts have it that Google has been in talks with T-Mobile for some time and now is in talks with both Verizon and Sprint. If it can net all three carriers to leverage phones with the Google OS, that would be far more than 6 million customers.
Based on Google's public stance on information, I would guess that Verizon might be the first, but not the _only_ cell provider that provides Google-centered telephony. If you watch their lectures and listen to what their spokesmen say, you'll see that Google's interests are in having ubiquitous access to the 'cloud' (their term), meaning that the lines between being online and offline blur to invisibility.
Locking in w/ one carrier doesn't match that goal, especially when you consider their interest in the 700mhz band.
My guess is that if Google makes their break for ubiquity, it will be viral. They'll release a 'Killer setup' on, say, a Verizon phone. Then a few months later, it'll be on a GSM phone, and a few months later, maybe on Some New Thing that hasn't been revealed yet. It'll be a useful set of apps/tools that's "just too useful" for the cell providers to ignore, while so cheap that they can't rationalize building competitive software.
Maybe Google will make them never ring in public places and inform the user when they're talking too loudly :)
I finally broke with Verizon and switched to T-Mobile, partly because the Verizon phones are impossible to hack without breaking through the wall of Get It Now. Verizon's entire business model would seem to be antithetical to Google's stated desire (with $billions behind it) to open up the wireless spectrum to any device, and to put the device owner in control.
In fact, it's not surprising that the article notes that "Google had already made significant progress in recent months with" T-Mobile. While not perfect (my daughter's phone won't let her use anything but $2 downloads for ringtones), T-Mobile is at least based on a more open technology (from what I understand). The surprise is that Verizon would even talk to Google at all. Maybe they aren't -- the article is based on "people familiar with the matter". Those "people" could be from Google, trying to kick-start talks with Verizon by putting the news on the CEO's front porch via the WSJ.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I'm more concerned about the potential collision of Verizon + Do No Evil... A paradoxical combination like this could rip a hole in the space-time continuum.
"...could this be "the deal" that establishes Google's hegemony in the internet sphere."
Ok, maybe I'm missing something, but haven't they already established their leadership roll on the internet? Really, is there a company out there more influential than Google when it comes to the internet?
So it'll hang up on you if you say "Can you hear me now?" Verizon won't be too happy about that...
This guy's the limit!
This is one reason I'm skeptical of getting fios service.
The phone companies really should be in the business of selling commodity bandwidth. No, I don't want your friggen' music video service, I want to access the video service I choose. The problem is that you don't make larger than normal profits selling commodities.
So instead, the phone companies do everything they can to make comparing their prices and service impossible. Their bills are full of portentous sounding charges, and they bury things anybody would really want to know, like whether your phone has the Bluetooth profiles it needs to connection your laptop to the Internet, under piles of crap services nobody in their right mind would buy. I'm convinced those services don't have to make money, they just have to make the decision of which carrier to choose more confusing.
Then there is simply the practice of making "mistakes" on how the bill is calculated, counting on the fact that the bill is structured to be confusing to help them get away with it. I just added a second line to my wife's Verizon mobile service, which involved upgrading to a more expensive plan. They "pro-rated" her service for the month by crediting out the cheaper service, and back dating the more expensive service to the start of the month. For good measure they added a couple of completely unexplained gobbledygook charges that doubled the bill. I'm going to have to spend hours dealing with this, hours of my life I have much better use for and which I'll never get back.
That's why I'm chary of getting fios, even though it looks better on paper. I don't want Verizon to be my content vendor in any case, and they've been underhanded as a bandwidth vendor. As bad as Comcast is, my experiences with Verizon have been worse. If I'd never dealt with them before, I'd have jumped with fios, that looks cheaper and faster on paper. For now it looks better to let my bandwidth hog neighbors jump into long term fios contracts and stay put at least until the DOCSIS 3 stuff is rolled out.
If Google jumps into bed with Verizon, it's an interesting choice; I'm not sure whether any of the vendors are better or worse with respect to being evil, but Verizon is making a major push to become a content vendor. Evil or not, this is not an outfit that is interested in letting net neutrality survive; but Google has up until now built a business around net neutrality. Google is everything AOL was supposed to be to the consumer, except that it's all about access to the universe of other peoples' content. We should look very carefully at whatever deal Google cuts with the carriers, because a shift away from philosophy could be a step towards leveraging their search monopoly into a content distribution monopoly.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
All this leads to Verizon being a better choice here than it might be in some areas. Also, and again, this may be a local thing, but the FIOS service division is totally distinct from the 'normal' Verizon service structure you usually encounter. Different techs, at any rate-- they're much better trained, and reports are that the service is extremely reliable. It's only just become available in my neighborhood, though, so I can't speak firsthand...Although it's being installed tomorrow, so we'll see.
I dunno, neither Comcast nor Verizon has its hands clean as far as most of the 'evil' sorts of issues the Slashdot "we" care about. Comcast throttles services, Verizon complies with the gov't on domestic wiretaps...You're pretty much boned either way.