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Nexus One a Failed Experiment In Online Sales
shmG writes "The demise of the Google Nexus One phone is fairly straightforward: a lack of sales killed the product. While it will continue to sell through Vodafone in Europe, KT in Korea and a few others, the experiment of Google indicates that selling a phone direct to consumers online is dead. 'The bottom line is people like to look at phones in the store. Google has a lot to learn about phone sales, this is one lesson they learned.'"
The reason why the Nexus One failed is because it was so damned expensive out of pocket.
Anyone else think that the Nexus One was a project designed to push Android adoption, and that Google's support for the hardware fell off because the rest of the Android hardware market bulked up sooner than they expected? it's an idea i've considered.
I never saw the Nexus One promoted, nor a link to the store anywhere (except perhaps on Slashdot.) Google has used their pageviews to promote other products and services, for example their ads for Chrome.
Could it be the reason Nexus One didn't succeed was simply a lack of promotion?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
95%+ of the population doesn't have a problem with being locked into a contract for two years in order to save a few hundred on a phone, especially since no provider gives any significant plan discounts to those who "bring their own device" in the USA.
So a non-subsidized phone is dead in the water from the beginning unless it offers something that's so unique as to be worth the price. (For me, if the N1 had a physical keyboard, I would have paid the money for it. Once they released the version that supported AT&T 3G, it was the only device that had a recent Android release on AT&T. However, it had no keyboard.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The reason it failed is likely a lack of marketing. That, and it was rather expensive. And it wasn't even possible to use it in some places because you need to buy a phone from your operator, right?
Anyway, hasn't this exact story been posted several times on Slashdot? This is definitely not the first "Nexus One failed" post. Why do we keep discussing it? Time to move on, perhaps?
Clever signature text goes here.
That's a whole lot of confusions, based on one case study. I'm not saying they're wrong, just that we need more data for these findings to be convincing. I'm always dubious of analysts selling opinions as facts. This is editorial, not news.
I guess that depends on what Google hoped to accomplish. From a pure sales perspective, the Nexus One didn't make a big dent in the market. But with Android, Google is trying something that Microsoft tried with WinMo, and failed at; one of the many reasons was stagnant, crappy and divergent hardware. I've never believed the purpose of the N1 was to sell a lot of phones... that was obvious from the selection of T-Mobile as the carrier... the purpose was to drive Android forward and keep it from falling into one of the traps WinMo fell into.
So if you compare pre--N1 Android phones to phones in the post-N1 era, the difference is startling. Nexus One may have failed in sales, but it succeeded in pushing the ecosystem forward. And I suspect that's all Google ever really wanted.
but they have been conditioned by expert marketing to view what they can afford by monthly costs. A phone contract looks less painful when you say $50 a month instead of $600 a year. People are made poor by the multitude of 'monthlies' they pay for. For many the cost difference between a contract and no contract is a wash.
Lets not forget one other issue besides price, better phones were not far behind coming out, not only technically better but marketed better.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I think it's rather silly to flatly state that selling phones direct to consumers is "dead." Just because Google didn't out sell the iphone, or push millions of units doesn't make direct-to-consumer sales dead. It just means that if you want to sell lots of phones direct to consumers, there are many lessons to be learned from Googles experiment.
I bought a Nexus One unsubsidized because Apple and AT&T refused to unlock my paid-for iPhone. I just moved out of the US and wasn't willing to pay literally hundreds of dollars per month to keep my phone tied to AT&T. Now, here in Norway I pay around $30 USD for the same basic service I was paying AT&T $85/mo for in the US. Sure I don't have the unlimited data that I had in the US, but 250MB/mo is enough for me and I can always buy more if I need it. At least I'm not paying the subsidy price forever like most US phone users.
I don't know if the average person really puts much thought into what they are paying for in a phone contract, but there will always be a market for users that want some more choice in their contract. It doesn't look like anyone is going to swoop in to fill the N1 market for the time being, but that doesn't mean that selling phones directly to consumers is "dead." It just means that no one has found the right way to do it and be profitable yet.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
especially since no provider gives any significant plan discounts to those who "bring their own device" in the USA.
My Android bill is $29 a month from Page Plus Cellular. Of course the carriers who sell expensive phones want you in the contract, so they would never offer you a good price if you bring your own phone in.
Their job is to fuck you, but not hard enough for you to switch to another company. Providing you with good cell service at a good price is quite secondary.
The demise of the Google Nexus One phone is fairly straightforward: a lack of sales killed the product.
“The idea a year and a half ago was to do the Nexus One to try to move the phone platform hardware business forward. It clearly did. It was so successful, we didn't have to do a second one." Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO [1]
Google has tried to paint the Nexus One experiment as a success because it helped build market presence for Android, its operating system.
Clearly false, Google has painted the Nexus One as a success because it has dramatically pushed phone hardware forward. Whether phones as powerful as the EVO 4G and Droid X would be available without the Nexus One, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
"I don't think they will (produce another phone)," Dulaney said. "Maybe when the market matures, like it did with personal computers, maybe then you'll see people buying phones off the internet. But right now people want to go in and see the devices."
Google's CEO announced that they wouldn't be producing a "Nexus Two" three motherfucking weeks ago. Thanks for the completely unnecessary speculation, though. "I called up the board and said: 'Ok, it worked. Congratulations - we're stopping.'" [2]
[1][2] Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7864223/Googles-Eric-Schmidt-You-can-trust-us-with-your-data.html
If you ask me, the slum is AT&T. It is kinda like Wal-Mart, crappy service, most products are the same cost as any other retailer in their segment. T-Mobile is Costco. Great service, not found in as many places, but in all the major metro areas, and a lot of midsize ones too.
I paid $500 for a Nokia n900 and get about $20 off my monthly t-mobile payment vs. what I would have paid with a subsidized phone. It evens out in the length of the two-year contract for a subsidized phone. And meanwhile I can plug in foreign SIMs when I go overseas, so I don't have to carry a separate unlocked phone. And could I really have resisted a phone that can run a full Debian distribution in a chroot while it also runs its own, mostly Open Source, non-Java, platform?
But I'm not the normal consumer, am I?
Bruce Perens.