It’s Thursday and that means I’m watching Cranky Geeks, a video podcast with one of my favorite technology pundits, John C. Dvorak. Joining him, on practically every show, is Sebastian Rupley, Editor in Chief of the GigaOM Network. He says in episode 197, and I quote:
“We got one [the Google Phone] at GigaOM yesterday. I held it. It’s a very nice phone, it’s very thin, it says Google on the back, and it looks very slick and everything, but we’ve decided already that it’s not going to be an iPhone killer. No way.”
When asked by Dvork why, Sebastian went on to say: “Because there aren’t a large number of apps on there.”
If you’re not uttering the word fail, repeatedly, in your mind, then I don’t know what to tell you. Knocking a phone, hell knocking a platform, simply because one has X number of apps while the number has 2X or 3X is simply being ignorant. The killer app for Macs, in the early days, was desktop publishing. The killer app for the personal computer was spreadsheets. The killer app for the internet was email. What’s the killer app for mobile phones? For some it may be GPS, for others it’s internet access anywhere at anytime, soon it will be mobile payments, but either way, it’s a handful of use cases.
100,000 vs. 20,000 vs. 100 vs. 1, the winner = give anyone a web browser, an alarm clock, and Google Maps and they’ll be happy.