安卓稱霸路線圖
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????谷歌（Google）之所以斥資125億美元收購手機制造商摩托羅拉移動公司，一是要保護自己免遭競爭對手的專利訴訟，二是要推動其移動業務實現跨越式發展。谷歌對摩托羅拉移動的收購也是這家搜索引擎巨頭史上最大的一起收購。回溯往事，若不是谷歌2005年做出了一次規模小得多的收購，焉能有今天收購摩托羅拉的壯舉？谷歌執行主席埃里克?施密特后來開玩笑地說道，他當年幾乎都沒有注意到拉里?佩奇和謝爾蓋?布林買下了那家小公司。當然，隨著安卓手機市場份額的飆升，情況早已今非昔比。《財富》雜志（Fortune）在2011年7月11日發行的雜志里詳細介紹了安卓（Android）系統的崛起之路。 ????1億安卓粉絲的眼睛是雪亮的—— ????谷歌征服智能手機王國內幕 ????作者：Beth Kowit ????谷歌2005年買下了一家毫不起眼的小型初創公司，這就是Android。當時即便在谷歌內部也沒有什么人對這起交易寄予厚望——很多人可能根本沒有注意到這筆微不足道的收購。因為谷歌當時剛剛收購了一批公司，其中大多都是做軟件的，谷歌“悄悄地進村”，把它們收編到了自己的運營隊伍里。（廣受關注的谷歌收購YouTube以及對DoubleClick的收購是后話。）谷歌執行主席埃里克?施密特后來開玩笑地說道，他當年幾乎都沒有注意到拉里?佩奇和謝爾蓋?布林買下了那家小公司。 ????時至今日，安卓系統已經不容小覷。手機操作系統就相當于手機的大腦，而現在安裝了安卓操作系統的移動設備已經達到1億多臺。（等你讀到此文的時候，這個數據應該已經過時了，因為每天全球都有40萬臺新的安卓設備被激活。）蘋果的iPhone使消費者見識到手機也可以很酷很強大。而谷歌向所有想要使用安卓系統的手機廠商免費開放了系統平臺，從而使智能手機真正成為了大眾化的產品。據最近統計，全世界有300多款手機和平板電腦都安裝了安卓的軟件。而唯一一支使用了iPhone操作系統的手機就是iPhone自己。安卓之父、現任谷歌移動部門高級副總裁的安迪?魯賓說道：“如果畫張圖來描繪我們的增長趨勢，你會發現，我們幾乎是在直線上升。” 中文譯文請關注最新《財富》（中文版）雜志 ????譯者：樸成奎 |
????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." |
