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Much has been made of the technical might of the new Google Nexus One, and to be sure HTC has cooked up some lovely hardware. Indeed, I personally have long lusted after a Snapdragon powered Android phone with a big screen, and here we have one, and it is a sweet, spritely, well formed machine.

 

Where the G1, with its relatively feeble CPU, was useful to illustrate the potential unrealized of Android, the Nexus One with its mighty 1GHz Snapdragon heart illustrates potential realized. Of course, the way in which we got one (Et Tu, Andy?) was a bit of a surprise, and as we have written about earlier, fragmentation is going to be one of the biggest challenges facing the Android platform.

 

With the surprise move of introducing their own phone and thus coming into direct competition with “partners”, like Motorola, who have bet the farm on Android, Google had other surprises in store.

 

While some say that Apple projects a reality distortion field from Cupertino, a similar reality distortion field emanates from the Googleplex in Mountain View. A brief visit to any of the trendy restaurants on Castro Street reveals Googlers, pale and plump, blinking as they emerge from flatpanel illuminated darkness, clad in corporate tshirts, talking about their new algorithms to other Googlers out on brief parole before returning to the hive to write some more code.

 

Things that once were absurd are taken for granted and traditional values and approaches are disregarded as old fashioned and irrelevant.

 

They say that the internet changed everything. And it did. At least some things, like the world of sock puppet Web sites and search engines. Of course one of the easier metacognitive errors one can make is that of overgeneralization. One might take past success in making killer search tools with link weighted Page Rank and architecting massive distributed systems and then believe that you and your 4.0 GPA cronies, although still wet behind the ears, can meditate upon a problem that has entire industries tied up in knots and without fuss or bother come up with your own, better solution sketched out on a napkin at Queen House and be done with it.

 

Of course, one of the other common metacognitive failures is where you suck at something so badly that you are unable to recognize that you do in fact suck. On a local sidenote, the whole “unskilled and unaware of it” factor makes motorcycling, particularly sportbikes, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a lot more interesting than it otherwise would be with lots of helicopter rides and ditch and woods exploration. Porsche and BMW group drives are similarly eventful, but I digress.

 

Support, is one of these areas where the best efforts of the “hivemind” have generated a guru meditation error. Normally, operators and major OEMs like Nokia will carefully plan the entire lifecycle of the device, from launch through eventual retirement. A key consideration of this overall plan is support.

 

With smartphones, support is even more critical than earlier, simpler devices. They are more powerful, but more complex and thus harder to configure and maintain. Figures we have seen at InnoPath point to support costs of about 4x a normal featurephone. People in the industry, both operators and the OEMs, understand this. They know and fear this as they are trying to figure out a way to replace lost voice revenue. Indeed, for those interesting in learning more about global operator thoughts on this and other topics, InnoPath and The Economist’s EIU have conducted a survey and will be doing a Webinar on this topic February 10.

 

So, in Brave New World 2.0, what is the solution?

 

Well, the Google model is, get this, no support. Instead you get a FAQ and an e-mail black hole and some Web forums. No 800 number, no calls, no nothing. Even laggard Sprint has figured out that some brick and mortar handholding can go a long way with smartphone support, as illustrated by the ReadyNow program. Don’t try taking that Nexus One to the Tmobile store. Not much for your $530, huh?

 

It gets even better, even if you buy the subsidized phone, TMobile will not be uninterested in your plaintive cries for help, but they will be happy to nail you with Early Termination Fees to the tune of $200 should you drop the service before your contract is up.

 

Then Google nails you for $350 for an Equipment Recovery Fee to cover the cost of the subsidy. Add these to the $179 subsidized price and you have a very spendy phone indeed at $729, particularly when the complete lack of live support is included. Ouch.

 

In the bad old days I used to do Enterprise IT. Fortunately I have long since escaped from that thankless role, where the best that you can hope for is a temporary absence of pain. Anyway, in the interest of minimizing pain, one of the most holy axioms in the business was that for anything important enough that you either have to make it work or trade in your keyboard for a paper hat and spatula, always go for the single vendor with the single throat to choke. The axiom holds that you never bet your career, or anything that you really care about, on multiple vendors being able to successfully parse responsibility and take ownership and deliver solutions when things are broken.

 

With the Nexus One? Well, we have three vendors. HTC, which made the hardware but didn’t sell it, is not interested in hearing from you. Tmobile, which runs the network but didn’t sell you the phone, is interested in getting your monthly check but doesn’t want to hear about your open market unlocked phone you bought off the internet. Google, who sold the phone, doesn’t want your call either, but they will take your money and perhaps point you at some self help stuff on the Web.

 

Welcome to the Brave New World.