The Simple Best

I love this article - and not only because it references Star Wars on multiple levels. Google appears to have an issue with fragmentation which has been debated ad nauseum in the blogosphere, but I think they also have an issue with fragmented launches. When they choose a launch partner (In the case of Honeycomb, Motorola) they limit what and who can play - meaning Samsung, LG, Lenovo et al are left out of the launch game. This is a positive in allowing you to focus your resources on one vendor to maximize impact of launch and work through bugs with one point of contact. Where it becomes a problem - and the Xoom appears to be evidence of this - is when your manufacturing partner cant execute flawlessly. Xoom came to market tied to a carrier (VZW) and without the WiFi-only option, making it's launch price point $100 higher than the iPad2. This leads to adouble-hurdle - first, you have to trigger to "buy impulse" with a higher price point AND you have to then get me to buy something that is not an iPAD for $100 more.

When you combine those two hurdles, you're left with an OS playing catchup (as they were all of last year) spinning their wheels while your main competitor in the space has cusotmers happily waiting weeks for product due to overwhelming demand

The Simple Best