{"id":2474,"date":"2009-12-30T15:45:41","date_gmt":"2009-12-30T15:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/?p=2474"},"modified":"2009-12-30T15:45:41","modified_gmt":"2009-12-30T15:45:41","slug":"my-2009-team-of-the-year-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/my-2009-team-of-the-year-award\/","title":{"rendered":"My 2009 Team of the Year Award"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Has to go to the folks behind Google Android.<\/p>\n

A couple of months ago when my Nokia N95 suddenly turned into a brick the inestimable James Whatley<\/a> aka whatleydude was kind enough to loan me an HTC Magic running the new mobile OS from Google. I played with the device for about five minutes before proclaiming: For now, Nokia, you’re dead to me.<\/p>\n

A couple of Christmases ago Stephen O’Grady had a similar experience with the iPhone, but I was never quite ready to join Apple’s Permission-based Web<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Magic though, has changed my living and working practices for the better. Its as simple as that. Its not as good a phone<\/em> or digital camera<\/em> as I am used to, but its aeons ahead as a web friendly device. Series 60 is hobbled for the web. This year the hobble turned into a wobble, and now Nokia is finally acknowledging that Symbian is a problem.<\/p>\n

To my mind it wasn’t the iPhone that really brought home the problem to Nokia, it was Android. The thought of all those Asian manufacturers bringing Android devices to a European market with a ready made business model through the carriers should concentrate the mind.<\/p>\n

That’s the thing – so far at least Android isn’t a phone, its an ecosystem.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to 2010 and a big question mark. Is Google about to kill the golden goose? Releasing its own Android phone onto the general market, as rumours clearly indicate, is not exactly a great way to instill confidence in partners. The temptation internally to favor the Nexus in APIs and so on is going to be too hard to resist. Android has has a few knocks already for its kinda, sorta open source approach, and I expect the volume of criticism to grow pretty significantly.Google seems to think it needs to own the entire stack to have a truly great user experience, but isn’t it possible hardware competition would have delivered just that?<\/p>\n

Funnily enough, for example, I prefer the HTC Magic to the Droid. It may be underpowered compared to the black monolith Verizon is selling, but it has better hand feel as far as I am concerned.<\/p>\n

Android as a trojan horse for Google’s apps ambitions makes perfect sense.\u00a0 Part of what makes the Android experience so great for me at least, is that I use Google Apps. All the syncing is done in the background for me. As a Google client it “just works” – beautifully.<\/p>\n

But Google is entering the hardware business now. I suspect competitors are breathing a sigh of relief. Except Apple perhaps -we can surely expect an Android “Slate killer” tablet sooner rather than later. But where does it all end? Will Google sell its own car navigation hardware? What about ChromeOS netbooks?<\/p>\n

I am looking forward to seeing if my team of 2009 can prove me wrong in 2010 by keeping the ecosystem happy and growing as it competes with hardware makers.<\/p>\n

This year the winner just screamed out at me, when I started considering it, so no runner up. Last year I chose a team<\/a> that I know personally, the IBM Eight Bar crew from Hursley Labs. This year I chose a team I can’t name a single member of, but they had a notable impact on me, and more importantly, an entire industry or two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Has to go to the folks behind Google Android. A couple of months ago when my Nokia N95 suddenly turned into a brick the inestimable James Whatley aka whatleydude was kind enough to loan me an HTC Magic running the new mobile OS from Google. I played with the device for about five minutes before<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[62,64,417,184,203,288],"class_list":["post-2474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-android","tag-apple","tag-google","tag-htc","tag-iphone","tag-permissionbasedweb"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-DU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}