????1億安卓粉絲的眼睛是雪亮的——

????谷歌征服智能手機(jī)王國內(nèi)幕

????作者：Beth Kowit

????谷歌2005年買下了一家毫不起眼的小型初創(chuàng)公司，這就是Android。當(dāng)時(shí)即便在谷歌內(nèi)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?yàn)楣雀璁?dāng)時(shí)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(jìn)村”，把它們收編到了自己的運(yùn)營隊(duì)伍里。（廣受關(guān)注的谷歌收購YouTube以及對DoubleClick的收購是后話。）谷歌執(zhí)行主席埃里克?施密特后來開玩笑地說道，他當(dāng)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(shí)至今日，安卓系統(tǒng)已經(jīng)不容小覷。手機(jī)操作系統(tǒng)就相當(dāng)于手機(jī)的大腦，而現(xiàn)在安裝了安卓操作系統(tǒng)的移動(dòng)設(shè)備已經(jīng)達(dá)到1億多臺。（等你讀到此文的時(shí)候，這個(gè)數(shù)據(jù)應(yīng)該已經(jīng)過時(shí)了，因?yàn)槊刻烊蚨加?0萬臺新的安卓設(shè)備被激活。）蘋果的iPhone使消費(fèi)者見識到手機(jī)也可以很酷很強(qiáng)大。而谷歌向所有想要使用安卓系統(tǒng)的手機(jī)廠商免費(fèi)開放了系統(tǒng)平臺，從而使智能手機(jī)真正成為了大眾化的產(chǎn)品。據(jù)最近統(tǒng)計(jì)，全世界有300多款手機(jī)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(tǒng)的手機(jī)就是iPhone自己。安卓之父、現(xiàn)任谷歌移動(dòng)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(huì)發(fā)現(xiàn)，我們幾乎是在直線上升。”

閱讀英文全文>>

中文譯文請關(guān)注最新《財(cái)富》（中文版）雜志

????譯者：樸成奎

????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 (That number will be out of date by the time you read this: Every day another 400,000 Android devices are activated.)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."

Read the rest.