iApple Products

Sep 22 2014, 07:45 IST

Knowledge is a game changer. If you have read the 2011 best-seller The Google Guys, gracefully written by Richard Brandt, you�ll get a sense of what really motivates the company�s two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In the words of Brandt, they have commercialised the Internet and started an Information Revolution the way Thomas Edison spurred the Industrial Revolution by harnessing electricity and saying, �Let there be lightbulbs.�

For the uninitiated, Google was founded in late 1998 by these two Stanford University computer science graduate students. The world�s most powerful Internet company came out of a project that only a computer scientist could love: developing technology to search through large electronic databases of published research papers.

Instead, they came upon a much greater solution� a better way to search through the giant morass of data that is the Internet�and ended up turning their technology into one of the biggest, most influential companies in technology today.

Just as Google Search has brought information at the fingertips of billions of people, Google, with its Android One initiative, is trying to make high-quality smartphones accessible to as many people as possible. Analysts estimate Google Android One based phones to reach roughly 2 million units this year and roughly 16 million units next year as the programme expands beyond India to other markets such as Indonesia, the Philippines and South Asia.

But technology alone does not make a successful company; business tactics do, and to say that Google has struck the right business chord in the mobile phone industry�with its Android One initiative�would be the understatement of the twenty-first century. Its Android phone operating system dominates the global smartphone market, with over 255 million units shipped and nearly 85% of the market share in the second quarter of 2014, says IDC. The worldwide smartphone market grew 25.3% y-o-y in the second quarter of 2014, establishing a new single quarter record of 301.3 million shipments.

Closer home, Google launched its first device from its Android One initiative last week. The company has tied up with homegrown handset makers

Micromax, Karbonn and Spice Mobiles to launch the R6,399 phone. The company has also roped in Acer, Alcatel Onetouch, ASUS, HTC, Intex, Lava, Lenovo, Panasonic, Xolo, and chipmaker Qualcomm as partners for its

Android One programme.

�Android One is a great new beginning and a sign of strategic importance that Google is giving to the Indian market for its mobile play,�