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With Essential, 'Already a Unicorn', Andy Rubin Wants To Disrupt the Apple-Samsung 'Duopoly' (cnet.com)
Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Essential, Andy Rubin's new startup, has added $300 million to its war chest as it looks to break into the highly competitive field of consumer electronics. The financing round valued Essential at $900 million to $1 billion, according to an analysis by Equidate, which runs a market for private company stock. In an interview, Rubin, who created Android, shared how the company plans to move forward: "I think when there's this duopoly with these two guys owning 40 percent of the market, this complacency sets in," Rubin said. "And that's the perfect time to start a company with this. Some people are complacent and it needs to be disrupted."
So what do they plan to do about it? Probably use essentially off-the-shelf designs - because there really isn't much real innovation in consumer electronics these days, and market their phone / TV / tablet / digital consumer assistant / sports watch / whatever with their brand name while using the same Chinese manufacturers as everyone elseâ¦
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Not sure "releasing yet another Android phone, this time with a camera obscuring the screen" is necessary technological disruption...
Of course the company is worth $1 billion dollars. If Andy Rubin sneezed, and three top hedge fund managers agreed that his snot could potentially cure cancer, they would be able to sell shares in his snot for $1 billion dollars. When interest rates are being supported at nominally negative rates by a central banking system beholden to the rich, the only investment that is a bad one is an investment so grounded in reality that it cannot be blown into a giant bubble.
Money is becoming worthless to those who have it, and unobtainable to those who don't. It's a different sort of monetary system failure from Weimer/Zimbabwe, and the high inflation of the 1980s, but it is probably going to end in a big mess none the less.
Yup. So the comparison is apt. How many phones have you seen? How many unicorns have you seen?
See?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't think anybody would call either Apple nor Samsung complacent...
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
It's not a duopoly in the mobile phone market, it's a duopoly for the high end market, where the profit margins are. I suppose this will be good if this spurs price competition. I don't know why people pay $700 for a device they only keep for 1-2 years.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I guess HTC, LT and Microsoft haven't figured out how to pick up the remaining 60% of the cellphone market.
Make the whole thing user-programmable, and you will win.
Take any business concept and there are duopolies. What happens is that two large companies take about 90% of the market share and the other 10% is split among a bunch of other smaller companies. Target/Walmart -> smaller versions like your corner store that sells movies, food and random electronics like USB chargers Lowes/Home Depot -> smaller versions exist all over the place and some are regional iOS/Android -> BB10, Windows and maybe a few others Even airlines are slowly consolidating. That's what happens when there are to many players. Consolidation happens till you have 1 or 2 major players and a few outliers. This guy is an idiot if he thinks that he can displace Samsung. He'll just get like 0.1% of the Android market if he is lucky.
"Essential" is not a good name for a company. Could he have named his company "You have to have it"? Or, "All others are garbage"?
Essential's phone OS is supposed to be open source, right? So far, so good. But it also seems to be based around a variety of gimmicks, such as its doofy camera stripe (the feature I guess being that the screen stretches up a bit higher) and its internet-of-things integration.
So who is their market? A, uh "phone enthusiast" would be giving up all of their Android or ios apps to move over to this, right? So that group won't be pouncing on it. "Phone gaming" is a huge market, but I'm not sure if that drives sales or is mostly a result of the ubiquity and capability of phones, but it doesn't seem like it is an overture to that group either, especially not with the screen all weird. Whatever section of the market uses their phone for productivity will probably be constrained by not being in one of the two bigger ecosystems, and the very larger more "I need a phone because it is just generally required to function in society at this point" type folks are not going to be catered to by an expensive top end phone anyway.
Is this thing more of a luxury item than an iPhone? Is it more open than an Android? Is it more functional at anything than either? Is it more secure than either? If it really ends up having some killer app or functionality, won't that just be copied by Apple and Samsung and Google and HTC within a year?
Maybe it's a trend I don't understand yet, but I think this is going to have a rocky start, and if it succeeds, it will be by battling hard for years. Either way I can't picture being super happy being an early adopter.
Create something small with a battery life longer then a day...
If he wanted to do something disruptive then he would have made a phone with a removable battery or one that actually lasts for a week. What we really have here is just another Android phone.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I don't see a third player here: Essential runs slightly modified Android.
Microsoft and Blackberry could be a third player but both exited the smartphone market. I, for one, dream of a third OS which is not based on the Linux kernel and Java (so Samsung Tizen doesn't count in my world). QNX sounds like an excellent idea - too bad Blackberry couldn't quite figure it out.
Although I applaud what he's trying to do, realistically, his company will be bought out and dismantled by one or the other. He and a few others will get big payouts and that'll be the end of it. If Samsung or Apple doesn't do it, maybe Microsoft will buy them out and ruin them.
To answer someone else's observation, that this is an android/ios issue not a Samsung/apple issue, it really isn't. This is not a philosophical war, it's an economic one. Samsung and Apple are the strongest players, and that transcends whatever OS or GUI they happen to be using. The point is to break up the vendor duopoly, not to provide yet another incompatible garden.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There is a duopoly, but it's really between Apple and Alphabet on dueling ecosystems (iOS vs. Android). Honestly, Samsung's position can easily be toppled, but Android and iOS are here to stay for now.
Nobody believes this is going to happen.
Look, I've made a lot in high tech startups, this one doesn't pass the sniff test.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You actually disrupt things by doing something, not by promising to do something.
You don't even have to be the first to do something to disrupt, so innovation isn't required. Look at the iPod, it was by no means the first digital music player, but it sure changed the game. Look at Tesla. SpaceX. Google Search. Google Maps. eBay. These are HARD things to do, and they put a lot of work into launching something that drew a lot of interest.
Promises are easy, delivering something is not so easy. I am not saying they can't do it, but they need to actually DO something first. So far, they've created a mobile phone. *yawn* The only reason that is so boring is because of the grand claims.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Their phone is overpriced. Doesn't matter how sleek it is. If anyone has a shot at disrupting Samsung it's OnePlus. I think one of the biggest reasons Samsung has done so well is that they basically throw every existing technology/feature on their phones as well as anything new they can come up with that somebody, somewhere might like. It's apparently what people want (which kind of makes sense), and a pogo connector isn't going to disrupt that if doesn't come with the other 30 things that people expect these days.
I was personally really interested in what Andy Rubin, is doing with Essential. The Essential phone seems like a nice design and I like the Titanium concept. I have been a Motorola fan since the original Droid, but Google and then Lenovo pretty much ruined that, since I have no trust in Google or a Chinese company like Lenovo. I don't see any truly trustworthy unlocked quality built off the shelf options on the current market and I'm hopeful the Essential phone will fill that gap.
I'm not much of a mobile geek, the one issue I wasn't sure about the phone is, will the Essential phone still have Google Maps? Yeah, I don't trust Google, but I'm willing to share some info for good navigation, I can turn off location services and limit the app when I don't want too share.
I don't care for Apple, and Samsung has some odd ideas about how the interface and device settings should be presented. I'd really welcome the Essential phone if it's a rugged sound design with a logically executed interface.
Huh huh. Eunuch horn. Heh heh.
They aren't all that common either.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I agree.
There was a marketing dude who wrote a book. I forget the exact title but it was something like, "10 Rules of Marketing".
One of the rules was that there was room in any market for one market leader and one smaller, lesser brand. Never any more than that. He had all kinds of examples of third place brands that went bankrupt or got bought out by the leaders.
And in the present situation, Android seems to be the market leader with Apple iOS the smaller brand (though by profitability, Apple is the leader). Now look at what happened to Nokia, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, WebOS, Palm, etc.
Rubin might have a shot but this would seem to violate this marketing rule.
It's lucky that this can't be trivially refuted by pointing out that there are more than two car manufacturers, brands of whisky, or makes of laptop, right?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it