IP Democracy: Verizon Embraces Google's Android

Business Week has this piece today that talks about "another sudden shift" at Verizon Wireless: the mobile carrier will support Google's open mobile software platform Android. In fact, as I suspected, Verizon's about-face on open access is not really as sudden as you might think.

While conspiracy theorists see Verizon's new game plan as a clever way to actually rip somebody off (consumers? application developers? regulators?), Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam simply read the writing on the wall and saw that openness is not only inevitable, but it also makes good business sense. For one thing, the current closed model costs a bundle in capital charges when carriers subsidize the handsets. Going to an open model simply foists the costs of acquiring customers onto other companies or even, as is the case in Europe and Asia, onto consumers.

And Google opened up the Pandora's box anyway with its Android platform. The open train was coming whether Verizon liked it or not. Verizon, however, liked it and appreciated that Android would foster thousands of applications that would otherwise not exist. "Android really facilitated this move,"McAdam says.

It's true that Verizon will probably figure out a way to make a buck with its new open platform that will justify the current skeptics. But openness in the U.S. mobile marketplace has been inevitable for a long time. Verizon is merely accepting the inevitable.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on December 4, 2007 12:32 PM to IP Democracy