What Miner and Google gambled on, and it seems bizarre in retrospect, was that the carriers and the manufacturers would be good at customizing and improving the user experience of the base operating system.
It made sense in context. Miner was the head of the Orange/FT research lab in Cambridge. A lot of creative engineers worked there but they were hamstrung by the junky phone SDKs available at the time. Android would have been just what they needed.
Yeah but I got to put stuff on my resume like experience with windows mobile 2002 and Symbian UIQ :)
At Orange we toyed with pushing an Android precursor from Savaje. However, the timing wasn't right - hardware wasn't powerful enough and Orange/FT didn't have the balls or corporate DNA to establish something like the OMA.
At Orange (or probably any carrier) getting a device out the door was a clusterfuck. You had to coordinate between the Device manufacturer (who never had any flexibility in their software schedule), the various operating companies who wanted phones in shop by Nov 1 for the Holiday or else, and various PM's running about trying to get features on the phone to help with their particular mandate (at the time it might have been music, IM, etc).
So yeah, anyone with half a technical clue could see that you could get shit done faster with a common OS. WHat's amazing is that with a little bit of juice from Google and a crack engineering team from Rubin they managed to totally dominate the non IOS smartphone market in a couple of years.
People seem to have this odd view that Android is deficient because it doesn't have some IOS optimizations. But look - if I told you to build something on one set of hardware and make it great that's 10x easier than building an open system. Yeah, closed systems may win in the end (and Apple is winning) but ANdroid couldn't be Android without a wider perspective.
It made sense in context. Miner was the head of the Orange/FT research lab in Cambridge. A lot of creative engineers worked there but they were hamstrung by the junky phone SDKs available at the time. Android would have been just what they needed.