‘Open’ VP Declares Himself ‘Lead Dog’ among Verizon Wireless Units
STANFORD, Calif. -- The Verizon Wireless new open-mobile business unit’s head sees himself as an internal “insurgent, a competitor against the rest of the business.” But Anthony Lewis, vice president of open development, said late Wednesday that he’s in the catbird seat as the rest of the company scrambles to align with industry’s new openness. “I'm the lead dog,” he said at the AlwaysOn and STVP Summit at Stanford University. “They're chasing me.”
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Lewis took care not to write off older business lines, though. “I have the future. I have the growth,” he said. “They will do very well, as they always have.” Opening the network “makes good business sense for us,” because “there’s a whole world out there” that wants offerings different from what Verizon offers, and the carrier wants to keep these users, he said. But there’s great uncertainty in how to deal with device makers and set service prices, Lewis said. “Designing price plans… is a huge hurdle to overcome, and certainly it is where I spend most of my time.”
Anyone waiting for handsets trying to trump the iPhone and the BlackBerry needs patience, Lewis said. The first outside gear that Verizon Wireless has certified as safe for use on its network is a telemetry device, an armored vehicle monitor by SupplyNet, Lewis said. Development in general is “leaning toward machine-to-machine devices” from parking meters to home automation, he said. Additional open devices will come out this year, but handsets will be few until 2009, Lewis said. He hopes Google’s Android operating system spurs a “huge” number of new devices. Outside handsets could run the gamut of prices and be sold through many channels, Lewis said.
Google’s mobile vice president, Rich Miner, denied reports that Android is tardy. “We're still on target” for a stated goal of shipping devices this year, he said. By mid- 2009, “there'll be a handful if not more handsets on a growing number of carrier networks around the world,” Miner said. The industry “might expect carriers to bring subsidized Android phones to market,” he said.
Apart from commitments to Google from early partners not to “fragment” the OS, anyone is free to create a new version, Miner said. But there’s little reason to, given the “large open-source code base” and “the large and growing developer community using the common set of tools” Google offers, he said. “The goal is that there’s a single version of Android,” Miner said, predicting it will be the de facto Linux standard in mobile. “Somebody will only be shooting themselves in the foot” by changing the OS, he said.
Android offers “a huge amount of flexibility to allow for personalization” of devices, Miner said. Google partners are devising many variations, he said. Manufacturers in its Open Handset Alliance are Samsung, Motorola, LG and HTC. Member carriers are T-Mobile, Sprint, China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI, Telefonica and Telecom Italia.
“Nokia as a company is handling the transition pretty well,” as industry power shifts from “handset OEMs to those who understand software,” Miner said. Near him on stage, David Rivas, Nokia vice president for software platforms strategy and business development, laughed at what he may have considered a backhanded compliment.
Rivas played up Nokia’s decision to go open source with its Symbian operating system, and balked at fellow panelists’ suggestions that all innovation flows from Google and Apple. Matt Murphy, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capital, insisted that the iPhone towers over other advances. “It is the North Star.” Kleiner Perkins and Apple have a $100 million investment fund to capitalize on the line’s runaway success. “People were just dabbling” on mobile openness even 12 months ago, and Apple and Google have moved the whole industry, Murphy said. “The App Store changed the world of mobile in 10 days.”