Jon

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has convinced himself that the company killed
its sold-direct-to-netizen Nexus One phone after less than six months
because it was "so successful."

"The idea a year and a half ago was to do the Nexus One to try to move
the phone platform hardware business forward. It clearly did," Schmidt
told The Telegraph, demonstrating just how far removed from reality his
mind has become.

"It was so successful, we didn't have to do a second one. We would view
that as positive but people criticised us heavily for that. I called up
the board and said: 'Ok, it worked. Congratulations - we're stopping'.
We like that flexibility, we think that flexibility is characteristic of
nimbleness at our scale."

His words are even further removed than an earlier explanation from
Android project lead Andy Rubin, who said the company killed its
Googlephone webstore because running the thing was just too complicated.
"Fundamentally, we do a direct-to-consumer distribution business where
you're hooking into these various provisioning systems for all these
operators all over the world," he told reporters at Google's developer
conference in late May.

"It's a pretty intense undertaking just, literally, hooking into the
billing systems that are available in all these operators in all these
countries, and what we decided to do was to focus our resources on the
platforms and the apps to make the platform shine rather than hooking
into provisioning systems and billing systems."

"[The Nexus One] was so successful, we didn't have to do a second
one. We would view that as positive but people criticised us heavily for
that. I called up the board and said: 'Ok, it worked. Congratulations —
we're stopping.'"

— the word from Eric Schmidt's world

But at least Rubin admitted that the store failed to "fundamentally
change the way phones are sold," as Google said it would. "From a
technology perspective, I think the Nexus One was the showcase
superphone at the time, and that set the bar," he said. "To be
revolutionary in the way people buy phones? That didn't happen."

Yes, he's still clinging to that "superphone" moniker. At launch, Google
said that the Nexus One belonged to a new super class of handset — even
though it couldn't match the Motorola Droid (according to none other
than Google open source guru Chris DiBona) — let alone the iPhone.

At launch, Andy Rubin also said he would be pleased if Google sold
150,000 Nexus One phones, and the company has apparently sold a little
more than 500,000.

If anything, the Nexus One showed that not even Google has the power to
compete with its own carrier partners. When the device launched, word
was that existing Droid partners Motorola and Verizon were, shall we
say, rather peeved. And it's clear that Google killed the Nexus One for
fear of damaging the rest of the Android market.

In Eric Schmidt–speak, that's what you call success. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07..._on_nexus_one/