Indian customers are also very class conscious, they would eschew a cheaper product merely because their servant maids can afford them. They are used to hardball by retailer and any naive implementation of US level customer service will be gamed to death within two quarters.
Google will do well to
1 open its own stores,
2 use its strength in access to capital,
3 introduce products with differentiation so that you would not be using the same phone your driver is using,
4 deliver superior customer service to those who play fair
5 undertake price war for the in market above "servant maids and drivers and cooks" sector and below the "MNC executive, people rolling in black money" sector
There is a third option: The boy is a "paper" MCP. He knows the right answer to the questions, but doesn't understand the reasoning behind it.
What part of Microsoft in MCP you did not understand? There is no reasoning behind it. Other than, it looked like a great way to screw some competition way back when we could do it. The only other reasoning other than that is, "the newbie code monkey hacked it this way and his/her manager was too stupid to catch it code review. Now it is carved in stone".
In other words, the reasons are either malice or incompetence.
Same way the ideal gas situation of FCC doing its stuff and the invisible hand of the free market doing its stuff and presto you got fantastic internet speed at the low low price of 9.99$ a month. The real gas situation is, all these companies raking money hand over fist lobby the politicians, the FCC, create misinformation campaign and they continue to exploit their customer base. Pressure builds till some disruptive technology comes in, cherry picks the customers and they leave in droves.
One possibility: It could be cell phone companies stringing up fiber up to street corner pillar boxes, and do the last 100 yards over the air with WiFi or a femto-cell network or something. The only true advantage the cable/phone ISPs have is the actual wire to different parts of the home via cat5 cable. But most homes use a router and use WiFi anyway. Someone could run fiber up to street corner pillar boxes, install a WiFi router per customer and cherry pick lots of customers who don't need more than a few WiFi devices. Wireless in the loop is quite well known and is actually deployed in many parts of India and Africa. My old prof Ashok has been talking about it for a long time.
But there could be other such technologies that peel of some serious segments of the captive market of the cable giants. Cable giants too would not sit idle. They would be the first to spot the threat and possibly buy these companies, or adjust their prices in different markets to keep these dogs chomping at their heels just out of reach. Somehow or the other, where such technologies are viable prices would come down. Where it is not viable, the customers would be at the mercy of these corporations
FedEx and UPS are not serving 80% of the country (by area, probably 10% by population). But at least they get US Postal Service. But the current generation of ISPs are suing to make sure government does not provide an alternative even to the market they don't want to serve.
On the other hand these animals do not have long term memory, and they might never remember the terror like we do.
Something similar happened to me a couple of times. When one falls asleep the brain to muscle control parts shut down. When it does not shut down properly people sleep walk and actually do things during REM. The order in which you this part shuts down, and the part that gets stimuli-response module shuts down seems to be a little muddled for me, it looks like. Long story short, just as I was drifting to sleep, the phone would ring or something, and I would try to reach over to pick the phone, but my arms and legs would not respond. The sheer terror I felt when I could not move my arms and legs was just incredible. But terror would immediately jolt the adrenal glands and adrenaline would flood the body, wake me up fully with racing heart and profuse sweat. Eventually I went through sleep studies and was diagnosed with very mild apnea and got a CPAP machine that kept my airways inflated with above atmospheric pressure (just 6mm of water, 1 atm= 10.24 meters of water). Then those episodes stopped.
But I will never ever forget the terror I felt when I my muscles would not respond to the commands I was giving them.
In Windows world, they could add non standard features to the software and support it in the OS making a mockery of standard compliance, lock the developers into their platforms, and force the cost of working with/around the "de factor" standard. It would not be as easy to do in Android and Linux, since they are not under Microsoft's control. But since Android and Linux are open source, they might try to pull a fast one and come up with "extended" linux/android, and probably try to pay other vendors to use it. But I don't think it would as easy to kill the standards as it used to be.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker