Google revolutionized search by recognising the power of the aggregating link information in pages. They reasoned that the more links a page has the more valuable it is. Tim O’Reilly regards Google as one of the best examples of Web 2.0 where collective intelligence is key. They developed an extremely successful business model on top this.

In a relatively short time they acquired a plateau in absolute reach. They could try to make people search more, but making them search longer or requiring registration was opposing to their core beliefs of a usable search function. In order to make people stay longer and require them to register they started to offer additional applications. GMail was said never to beat Hotmail, but 1GB of storage and a well designed user experience made it flourish. Now they are slowly entering the productivity market with Google Apps. Free, but designed to make you stay longer requiring you to enter into an explicit relationship giving ’some’ information.

How does a cellphone strategy fit into this development?

First of all Google is about empowerment. It gives us the tools to search (and find) information on the web. It helps you communicate by mail normally. And lately it is helping you create, manage and publish your information in various well know forms such as spreadsheets and presentations. Each time it identifies the need/desire of an individual and successfully addresses this in simple and elegant applications. They have managed not to annoy people with advertisement and still make money.

You might think they will start their own carrier. Or they are expressly designing a new operating system to bring their applications to the masses. And you might conclude that they want to aggregate the operators. But I don’t think either of these are their core strategy.

The operators are in the way because they are aggregated and vehemently protecting their territory. It is also true that the current mobile phone technology is not what consumers expect, or require. And a Google branded carrier is interesting, but too marge of a margin business, I think.

I think Google will try to free us. It will be offering a wonderful operating system, with good applications, for anything you can do with current cellphone technology, and more. It will aim to help you reclaim your own device. Not by make disabling the simlock, but by enabling you to completely bypass the operating system tweaked by your provider. Just install your another one!

Google might just be about to harness the open source communities and play as a catalyst for adoption and ease of use. Not a gPhone but mGoogle, the Ubuntu of the cellphone market.

Google is not the only party that is slowly realizing the deadlock in this industry can be broken by freeing the individual. Recently Nokia is marketing new phones by addressing this desire for freedom.