On a chilly February morning Andy Rubin hustles past equation-filled whiteboards in a two-story building on Google's Silicon Valley campus.
Rubin, a computer scientist who builds robots for fun, has spent three years in this top-secret sanctum of the Googleplex.
He's putting the final touches on one of the most ambitious and potentially humbling projects the internet juggernaut has undertaken: an operating system for mobile phones that's designed to give Google the same grip on the mobile web that it commands in online search on personal computers.
"We've reached the point where anyone can build a cell phone," says Rubin, 44, dressed in blue jeans and a red T-shirt as he explains why Google is piling into wireless, the internet's new frontier.
"What's important now is software, having the next cool application."
After luring an audience that tops 588 million people who search in more than 200 languages, and winning 72 per cent of the $22.5 billion ($24.4 billion) in annual advertising linked to web queries, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are looking beyond the PC for growth.
Fewer Googlers are clicking on the text ads that run alongside Google's search results, threatening the area that generated most of the company's $US16.6 billion in 2007 sales.
Turning to telecoms won't make Google's life any easier, as Microsoft already holds 21 per cent of the US market for mobile operating systems.
Winning its bid for Yahoo would give the software giant the most popular site on the mobile internet, with 28 million combined subscribers, according to Seattle researcher M:Metrics. That compares with Google's 14.5 million.
Meanwhile, the phone companies that control the wireless networks aren't likely to bow to Google at the expense of Apple's iPhone and other hot products.
Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T's wireless division, says a so-called Google phone could probably become just one of the many offerings in AT&T shops.
originally posted by Australian IT
