安卓称霸路线图
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谷歌（Google）之所以斥资125亿美元收购手机制造商摩托罗拉移动公司，一是要保护自己免遭竞争对手的专利诉讼，二是要推动其移动业务实现跨越式发展。谷歌对摩托罗拉移动的收购也是这家搜索引擎巨头史上最大的一起收购。回溯往事，若不是谷歌2005年做出了一次规模小得多的收购，焉能有今天收购摩托罗拉的壮举？谷歌执行主席埃里克•施密特后来开玩笑地说道，他当年几乎都没有注意到拉里•佩奇和谢尔盖•布林买下了那家小公司。当然，随着安卓手机市场份额的飙升，情况早已今非昔比。《财富》杂志（Fortune）在2011年7月11日发行的杂志里详细介绍了安卓（Android）系统的崛起之路。 1亿安卓粉丝的眼睛是雪亮的—— 谷歌征服智能手机王国内幕 作者：Beth Kowit 谷歌2005年买下了一家毫不起眼的小型初创公司，这就是Android。当时即便在谷歌内部也没有什么人对这起交易寄予厚望——很多人可能根本没有注意到这笔微不足道的收购。因为谷歌当时刚刚收购了一批公司，其中大多都是做软件的，谷歌“悄悄地进村”，把它们收编到了自己的运营队伍里。（广受关注的谷歌收购YouTube以及对DoubleClick的收购是后话。）谷歌执行主席埃里克•施密特后来开玩笑地说道，他当年几乎都没有注意到拉里•佩奇和谢尔盖•布林买下了那家小公司。 时至今日，安卓系统已经不容小觑。手机操作系统就相当于手机的大脑，而现在安装了安卓操作系统的移动设备已经达到1亿多台。（等你读到此文的时候，这个数据应该已经过时了，因为每天全球都有40万台新的安卓设备被激活。）苹果的iPhone使消费者见识到手机也可以很酷很强大。而谷歌向所有想要使用安卓系统的手机厂商免费开放了系统平台，从而使智能手机真正成为了大众化的产品。据最近统计，全世界有300多款手机和平板电脑都安装了安卓的软件。而唯一一支使用了iPhone操作系统的手机就是iPhone自己。安卓之父、现任谷歌移动部门高级副总裁的安迪•鲁宾说道：“如果画张图来描绘我们的增长趋势，你会发现，我们几乎是在直线上升。” 中文译文请关注最新《财富》（中文版）杂志 译者：朴成奎 |
Google's proposed $12.5 billion acquisition of handset maker Motorola Mobility is a bid to protect itself from litigious competitors as well as to dramatically move its mobile business forward. But the search titan's biggest acquisition ever wouldn't even be imaginable if it were for a much smaller 2005 purchase. Executive chairman Eric Schmidt would later joke that he scarcely noticed when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought the company. Of course, with booming market share, that has all changed. Fortune chronicled the rise of Android in its July 11, 2011 issue: 100 million Android fans can't be wrong The inside story of how Google conquered the smartphone world. By Beth Kowitt, writer When Google (GOOG) acquired a tiny wireless startup called Android in 2005, few at the search giant had particularly high hopes for the deal -- if they even knew about it. At that point Google had purchased just a handful of companies, mostly software makers it had quietly folded into its operations. (Big, high-profile deals like YouTube and DoubleClick came later.) Besides, not many people knew exactly what Android did: The upstart was in stealth mode, and co-founder Andy Rubin, best known for creating the Sidekick mobile device, said little about its product or mission. Executive chairman Eric Schmidt would later joke that he scarcely noticed when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought the company. Today, of course, Android is impossible to ignore. It is the mobile operating system -- the brains of a cellphone -- that powers more than 100 million gadgets. (That number will be out of date by the time you read this: Every day another 400,000 Android devices are activated.) Apple's (AAPL) iPhone gets credit for showing consumers just how cool and powerful a mobile device could be, but Google democratized smartphones by making Android available free to any handset maker that wanted to use the platform. At last count, Android software was on more than 300 different phones and tablets around the world. The only smartphones that use the iPhone operating system? iPhones. "If you just plot the graph looking at how quickly we grew," says Rubin, now senior vice president of mobile at Google, "it's almost vertical." |
