$GOOG essentially set out to do two things with the Nexus One:

• Demonstrate the capabilities of Android in a high-end, unlocked phone
• Challenge the channel – i.e. the carriers – that sell and distribute those phones by going direct to consumers.

On the first count, Android’s growth has been nothing short of phenomenal, and while it cannot be easily quantified it’s quite clear that Nexus One had at least something to do with that.

On the second, it’s certainly true that Google didn’t succeed – and while it’s also true that the Nexus One is already being surpassed by new phones such as the Droid X and EVO (not at all a bad thing for Google – or $MOT or $S or $HTC or $VZ) it should also be understood that carrier-distributed phones are often modified in a way that can make their subsidies less attractive than they may seem.

I know because I own a Nexus One.  It is a fabulous phone, but most importantly it is completely unlocked.  I have absolutely free turn-by-turn navigation, absolutely free tethering and hotspot service, and the ability to do practically anything I want with the phone.  No $10 here, $30 there carrier charges for any of the above – or anything I want to do with it.  Yes I paid more for the phone (quite a bit more) but those monthly charges add up, and the freedom I’ve gained is well worth the cost I paid.

Android continues to expand rapidly, and while the Nexus One will someday be a footnote in its history, it played a significant and important role in getting this market – and a real challenger to $AAPL’s iPhone – established.

As for the channel, it will be a while before US consumers come to appreciate how carrier ‘features’ are actually locking and crippling their devices – but that day will come.  And the Nexus One will have perhaps played a role in that transition too.

In all, Nexus One is/was a grand and gutsy experiment by Google that payed off at least partially.  They could have done far worse.

Of course, the big news this week has been Facebook’s announcements ($FBOOK) that they will be putting ‘Like’ buttons everywhere and working to create a universal identification/authentication infrastructure by making the web more ‘social’.  Obviously a shot across the bow of Google ($GOOG) whose various social initiatives (Orkut, Buzz, Latitude, etc…) have borne little fruit thus far.  Google has to be thinking very hard about buying Twitter ($TWIT) who has also been heavily in the news lately – and actually (finally) has a revenue model – an acquisition that could look a lot like the company’s successful integration of YouTube.

We’ve also seen the less-covered but very strategic acquisition of Jigsaw by Salesforce.com ($CRM) – allowing Jigsaw’s crowdsourced contact data services to be directly integrated into Salesforce’s cloud-based applications and Force.com platform.  The capability to integrate data into Salesforce and other sales/CRM tools is not necessarily new (Jigsaw and competitors including OneSource ($IUSA) and Hoovers ($DNB) have been part of Salesforce’s AppExchange for quite some time) but the acquisition gives Salesforce the ability to tie the services even more closely together and create some new productized offerings that are a no-brainer upsell for their customers.   Those wondering what Salesforce would be doing with the $500M they raised earlier this year now have their answer – and AppExchange should provide plenty of candidates for the company’s acquisition machine.  Fellow Enterprise Irregular Jeff Nolan wrote a great post on Salesforce’s acquisition earlier this week.

In other words, what Facebook (and Google) are trying to do for consumer data, Salesforce is doing for B2B/sales data – wiring identity more deeply into cloud-based applications and services.  Privacy advocates will howl but the trend is undeniable (and probably unstoppable).

On the sidelines (so far) are Apple ($AAPL) and Microsoft ($MSFT).  Just as I expect Google to be eyeing Twitter as a potential acquisition, both Apple and Microsoft have to be eyeing Facebook, despite the eye-popping valuation such a deal would require – at least both can afford it.  Despite their success with their hardware and integrated software offerings, Apple has thus far stumbled in delivering more open, web-based solutions – MobileMe has been one of their rare flops.  Microsoft has already tried – and failed – on this front (anyone logged in with Windows Live out there?).  An acquisition of Facebook would make sense for both companies – although Microsoft should have the inside track should they choose to use it.

The next frontier will be tying mobile identity and data into these initiatives – which is already underway.   Facebook is already rapidly becoming wired into iPhone and Android address books – the open question is how far Apple and Google intend to allow them to go.  Microsoft’s moribund mobile business could be the biggest beneficiary – or biggest loser – of all.

Cross-Posted from Selland Capital

Overall

Love it – terrific phone.  Actually much nicer-looking live than on the web.  Powerful, customizable and fast.

The Good

The Not-So-Good

Overall

Most pundits will likely praise Google for staring down the Chinese government and choosing “doing good” over “doing evil”. To help Google shareholders and the rest of the world better understand this decision (assuming it occurs of course), would Google please answer the following questions?

As most tech followers are aware, Apple’s forthcoming iPad (as well as the iPhone and iPod line) will not support Flash – meaning that an obviously important new media consumption device doesn’t support the so-called ‘standard’.  Instead, Apple as well as Google have thrown their weight behind a new emerging ‘standard’ – HTML5.

I pointed Leigh at this post by Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of BrightCove, which gets into detail on the emerging battle between Flash and HTML5.  As the post states, ‘there’s a lot of nuance here’ – and it’s by no means a foregone conclusion that Flash will be going away anytime soon.  Also interestingly (and probably not coincidentally), $TIVO announced wide-ranging support for Flash this week.   In addition, Flash currently represents only about 5% of Adobe’s revenue and is dwarfed by the revenues derived from its desktop applications business.

Nonetheless, while Adobe has remained a strong and well-managed tech company for many years, and Flash remains widely supported, it’s hard to believe that being lined up against $GOOG and $AAPL is an attractive place to be.  It certainly suggests caution – and a deep dive into the Flash vs. HTML5 debate – is advised for those considering future prospects for $ADBE.

So far we’ve seen great numbers from the likes of well-established tech companies such as $CSCO and $HPQ, and much weaker results from ‘cheap tech’ like $DELL and $S (both which I’ve recently been long and wrong about).

In other words, the strong are getting stronger – and the less-strong are hanging in there – barely.

What this says to me is that buyers are rotating toward the market leaders, which benefits the likes of the aforementioned $CSCO, $HPQ as well as others including $IBM, $ORCL, $GOOG, $CRM & $AAPL.  I’ve been adjusting my personal portfolio – for instance I spoke a bit about $ORCL with Dr. Phil earlier this week and like it long-term, particularly post their Sun Microsystems acquisition.

I’m also looking hard at $MSFT – whose financial performance continues to excel despite the ongoing (and mostly justified) beatings they are taking in the court of public opinion.

Much like Google Wave – which I to this date have not found any real use for – I played around a bit and quickly tired of Buzz.

Then I happened to take a visit to Google Reader, and things got more interesting.  I noticed that those I had followed in Buzz, I was now also following in Reader – and those people were effectively curating new and interesting content for me.

I also took a look at PicasaWeb and looked to see if the same thing had happened – and while there were no automatic suggestions there, under ‘Suggested Favorites’ were many of the same people.

Hopefully you get the picture.  Buzz isn’t just another Twitter/Facebook($FBOOK)/FriendFeed/etc… clone or wannabe.  Rather it’s both an aggregator and a linking mechanism by which I can choose those with whom I want to be connected – and how deep I want those connections to go.  In other words, Google aspires to own the infrastructure of the social web – and Buzz is the point of that arrow.

There have, of course, been suggestions that Buzz is a Twitter-killer.  First of all, let’s face it, Twitter has become a popularity contest.  While I do try to follow back anyone who looks like a real – and thoughtful – person – that has caused Twitter to become simply too noisy to go there much anymore.  Thus, I rarely look at my ‘main’ feed anymore – although I do use Lists as a way to curate those who I truly care about.  But while Lists have helped, fundamentally Twitter is a system that gets less useful as it gets more popular.

Twitter Search also, at least for me, stinks.  Every time I try to find a Tweet either I or an acquaintance wrote more than a few weeks ago, I almost always have trouble finding it.  The one thing – the only thing really – I use FriendFeed for is the Twitter Search that Twitter can’t seem to deliver.  If Buzz can do that, all the better – I can do my searches right in Gmail.

As a matter of fact, I can start to do all my searches inside of Google properties.  If I’m headed to an unfamiliar city and have a hankering for a burrito, open opinions of the Yelp variety might be nice, but knowing that trusted friends of mine have been there is even better.

The real target of Buzz clearly seems to be Facebook.  My ’social’ world essentially consists of two types of people – my online, social, early-adopter (mostly) professional contacts who are on both Twitter and Facebook, and my family and friends from other places in my life who are on Facebook but have perhaps heard of Twitter, but certainly aren’t engaged. In other words, Facebook is becoming ubiquitous – the platform for interconnecting true friends – not just building mutual follow-back numbers.

Facebook is fun, Facebook is popular, Facebook has momentum, and Facebook will likely have a huge IPO in the not-too-distant future.  But history repeats itself, and there are a number of things happening in 2010 that remind me of 2000.  While Facebook has become a lot like AOL – a very popular and highly valued network that the technorati may sniff at, but which has massive mainstream appeal – it also has the same Achilles heel – its ‘walled garden’ structure.  Jason Kottke did a great post on this a few years ago that has stuck with me – Google could be the attacker that manages to turn Facebook ‘inside out’.

In other words, Google appears to be betting that taking the ‘open aggregator’ approach (even if it’s not really open)  will erode Facebook’s subscriber advantage much like the open web eroded AOL’s ($AOL).  If that happens, Facebook may need their own version of Jerry Levin.

As for Twitter, the most speculated deals rarely happen, but Google already proved with YouTube that it will gladly pay up for leadership.  I’m not necessarily sure they need Twitter at this point, but acquiring the company would undoubtedly give the Buzz initiative an even quicker jump-start.  At this point, the only thing that appears to stand in the way of Google acquiring Twitter is someone else getting there first.

Reposted from Selland Capital

iPad is cool media consumption device, but those who buy it as a computer will be disappointed – although it might be a good solution for my mom.

The far more interesting question raised by the Apple event is what happens to wireless pricing – particularly wireless data – going forward.  The announcement that AT&T would be the carrier, and pricing would be $14.99/$29.99 was the most notable thing said in the event.

Let’s first of all get out of the way, nobody (except maybe my mom) is going to pay $14.99.  Remember this is a media device.  250 MB barely gets you a movie trailer, much less a movie.

So if you figure everyone’s paying $30/month, that’s not so bad especially considering the connection is wired to the device and can’t be shared.  A family such as mine with 4-5 iPad users could be running up $120+/month in data charges.  That pays for a lot of movies.  (Fortunately I’ve also equipped mi casa with a kick-ass cable WiFi setup, so any iPads purchased in my home will be the WiFi only versions).

Still, it’s becoming increasingly clear that 2010 will witness significant change if not outright decline in wireless pricing.  This will be great for the market by opening the doors for new types of mobile applications.  But it’s probably not so great for the carriers.

AT&T ($T) is clearly in the spotlight – it’s time to not just talk about their network but deliver.  I have a hard time believing a company as smart as Apple would have hitched their new wagon to a star that couldn’t – but we shall see.

My recent misplaced optimism on Sprint ($S) was heavily dependent on Sprint’s pricing being significantly lower than AT&T & Verizon ($VZ) – my $S position was stopped out at a small loss after $T & $VZ announced new ‘improved’ pricing and partially kicked the legs out from under that investment thesis.  I still believe Sprint is well-positioned strategically but they’re in no position to fight a price war with their much bigger competitors.

Of course, if you really want an iPad and are going to be mobile, you could always buy the WiFi version and get yourself a MiFi.  I am currently long Novatel ($NVTL) and might just wind up with a ‘mobile’ iPad 30 days sooner than the rest of you.  Plus if my kids need to rent a movie, they can share my connection.