Too Little, Too Late Verizon

I was, until recently, a Verizon Wireless customer. Despite the facts that Verizon definitely has the best service coverage nationally, and is ranked the number 1 wireless provider, I switched to AT&T, and I bet you can guess why. If you guessed iPhone, you would be correct. I don’t live in New York and I don’t live in the Bay Area, I live in Boston and in Boston, AT&T works fine (if I start to have problems I will definitely write something about it). Coverage is great and all, but a phone is so much more than just a device for conveying voices from one handset to another. Rather, what the phone can do is important. A case could definitely be made that things like the iPhone are not really even phone, but that’s a different topic.

I see today that Verizon is going to start carrying Android phones, and you know what I say to this? Too Little, Too Late. Phones need an ecosystem in order to succeed. They need functionality that is both built into the phone itself and extensionality that is built in through applications. I love Google, and when Android came out I was all for it. I could see a place where Android would be the OS of choice since it was so easy to develop for and that development was supported by Android. But this never really came to pass. Android exists, and there are some things developed for it, but it still does not come close to the ecosystem for the iPhone; despite the fact that Apples is way more closed and oppressive than Google in this regard, I mean just look at Google Voice.

Recently some Android developers came under fire for creating ROMS for the Android phones. The lawyer end of Google told them to stop because they were including proprietary Google code in their ROMs. They included Google’s mobile apps and Google’s lawyers gave the developers a cease and desist for including them, since the mobile apps themselves are not open source.
Now Google is a company and thus they have lawyers. These lawyers do what all lawyers do, they try to enforce rules to protect their companies interests while at the same time Google’s developers, the people that want to make software and the internet more open, support and are part of the developer communities. So there is a little of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing between the Google developers and the Google lawyers. The developer community, which is small compared to the iPhone community, seems to be mainly geeky techie people (this is not a bad thing). It seems to me that the Android phones are more of a toy for the tech savvy, the people that like to dismantle their gadgets and write new and better code for their toys. This brings me to my main point.

Verizon is jumping on the bandwagon but they are doing it wrong. Verizon, for the longest time, has never had any good phones; they had and have great service (just watch their new ad below), but on that service, the consumers are given little choice.

Now Verizon is going to have Android phones, and while these phones are “cooler” than the phones they usually have, they will not be enough and the reason is that none of these phones have an ecosystem that really jumps out to the consumer. Verizon says they will support Google Voice, no details on how or to what extent yet, and that is a selling point. However, eventually Apple will allow it too (I suspect), mooting that selling point. I don’t think that the Android phones will really cause people to switch to Verizon, but it will do more to stop people that are already Verizon customers from making the jump to another provider. But will it be enough?

Probably not, but it could be if Verizon gets in there and helps to create an ecosystem the Android phones can exist in. A place where the phones are not just a sophisticated piece of technology, but a great gadget with loads of extensionality, and fun. But as we have seen in the past Verizon does not really care about the consumer, so at the end of the day Verizon is totally half assing this. They are getting coolish phones, but not going full on to the coolest phones, the phones that could not only be a boon to their advertising, but then they would have awesome phones and awesome service, launching them way, way out in front of any of their competitors. But, as I said, Verizon does not really care about the customer, yeah there is a map for that, but it would be so much better if there was a map and an app for that too.