Google Responds

iSuppli reports that the Kindle Fire has vaulted into second place in the tablet market. At 3.9 million shipped units, Kindle Fire numbers are nearly triple its nearest competitor (Samsung, at 1.3 million). Add in the Barnes & Noble tablet, with shipment estimates also at 1.3 million, and “forked” Android devices ring in at a solid 19% of market share.
The RIM tablet, meanwhile, is headed in the other direction, with a high level of unsold PlayBook inventory. There is some irony here, as Amazon used the PlayBook as a reference design for the Fire.
We’re not surprised at how this has turned out. The end-to-end model, with hardware, software and a retail presence, is emerging as the best way to incentivize consumer tablet purchases. Up to now, however, we have focused on Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble — they have the strongest end-to-end presence.
One wonders how Goggle will respond to this competitive threat — threat because, while Amazon and Barnes & Noble use Google’s Android to power their devices, they substitute their own ecosystem for that of Google’s Android. That’s a willful avoidance of Google’s advertising model.
Wonder no more. Claire Cain Miller and Nick Bilton, writing for the New York Times, report that Google is working “on a delivery service that would let people order items from local stores on the Web and receive them at their homes or offices within a day.” Combined with Google Wallet and Google Offers, the services offer a proxy for the retail presence of Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Will it work? Well, there’s a chance. Google’s biggest enemy at times is itself, with a penchant for perpetual Beta’s that lead nowhere fast. This is not necessarily a knock; all successful tech companies have a backlog of failed products. This time out, the pieces for an end-to-end retail experience do appear to be coming together. The trick for Google is to integrate these three experiences (wallet, offers and delivery) into a seamless whole.
One thinks Google may well deliver — if only because they must. Once they build a retail experience into Android, it will become (nearly) ubiquitous. The bigger question is whether anyone will care. Preliminary surveys indicate consumers don’t trust Google Wallet for mobile payments. That’s a big hurdle to overcome.
Update: Although it may cause another set of problems, one wonders how long Google will sit on the Motorola acquisition before trying to leverage it as part of an end-to-end strategy.

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