G1 Phone is out, but it will not take off.

I honestly doubt this phone will scale. The reason why I think this would not scale really is because the mobile phone market is already satuarated with many small players and a few dominating ones. And we learnt clearly from strategy classes, that in a market like this, the incumbent will catch up and kill the market entrants. But then again who can kill Google?

But note, the fact that the phone (as a hardware) won't scale like that of Iphone, does not mean that the software(google apps etc) won't.

I believe Google, with their involvement in the Android opensource framework for mobile applications really show that they are in to revolutionize the way we use our phone, not so much to revolutionize phone. Of course, this might not seem feasible at a glance, but let's take a step back and see what happens if every phone is installed with Google Apps?

1. Their search hits will increased greatly, with the increased saturation of the online search market, this is their best way out to increase their market capture share - think about it, not everyone has a computer but most of us have a phone and that phones follows us everywhere. So far, not many search engines built applications that are meant for phones, and google i believe will continue to be the market leader in mobile and desktop searches for many years to come.
2. Increased advertisement sources. Instead of just being able to advertise for companies with an online presence (i.e. a website), Google will now be able to get business from small companies without any form of online presence. This is made possible by their ShopSavvy application (google app available from their g1 phone). There is now more reasons for these offline companies to advertise on Google.
3. Increased advertisement income. Google did an excellent job in increasing advertisement tagetting, in fact its so damn good, I click on the advertisements all the time. By being in the mobile phone industry, the software will be able to track where we are and feed to us advertisements that are more highly targeted. By being location-aware, the advertisements are getting more targeted and as a result, advertisers are definitely willing to pay a higher premium.

I believe the G1 phone will not really take off and capture a huge portion of the market. But one thing for sure, the softwares that google came up with, specifically google search, mail, maps and shopsavvy will revolutionize how we do our shopping and eventually our way of life.

I recalled from my economics class, that the professor once said. Economists like to think of the world in extreme scenarios that is, the market is either in a perfect or imperfect condition. In my humble opinion, with googleapps, information is getting perfect, we are not quite there yet, but we will one day.

I look forward to the day in my life that all barcodes are uniformlly standardized across the world. All product's barcodes uses electronic ink, compatible with RFID. All shops have a Standard Centralize Point of Sale System. If such a world exists, information of goods and services could then be truly perfect.

We are getting there, and googleapps - not the gphone. Will bring us there.