Great analysis in Paid Content about the forthcoming Amazon Kindle Tablet and why it could succeed where other Android apps have failed:

Amazon is a conduit to lots of content; and, just as importantly, it already has a way for you to buy content from it. Like Apple, it is one of the 10 biggest merchant holders of credit card numbers in the world (along with companies such as eBay, PayPal, Sony through the PlayStation Network and Microsoft through its Xbox Live system).

Notice the company missing from that list? Google. It has almost no relationship in financial terms with the average person. Not surprising, given that all its business is done with customers

By contrast Apple and Amazon are familiar as transaction handlers: Apple has 200 million iTunes accounts, of which a very significant number have credit cards attached. Amazon isn’t quite as big, but for people in North America and Europe, it’s a company they trust with their details.

Tablets lack what smartphones have: ready-made content. If you’ve got a smartphone then its obvious use is for making phone calls or sending texts – essentially, you create the content. The data-enabled stuff is a bonus.

With tablets, though, that’s reversed. A tablet is a tabula rasa—a blank slate until you get something onto it. Yes, with the standard Android tablet you can do some browsing, and triage your email, and check what the weather is going to be tomorrow on a weather app, but truly, when it comes to content, Android Honeycomb is simply dire; it’s no contest with what you can get in app terms on the iPad. I’ve been trying a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10 over the weekend and while it’s a nice piece of kit, the call for apps that will show off Honeycomb to its fullest draws a silence as wide and deep as the ocean.

Why are apps so poor on Android? I think it’s the classic problem: users find it hard to pay for apps, because there’s no simple payment mechanism (is it credit card? Google Checkout? Carrier payment?), which makes them uneasy. So good developers can’t get paid, so they don’t develop good stuff, so the Android Market is overrun with rubbish made at the lowest possible cost, because there’s no point killing yourself to not get paid.

I was going to stay out of the whole Google Plus Nymwar debacle, but then I got flagged by Google, and now it’s personal. (I had to switch my name from “Jenny (Phire Phoenix)” to “Jenny Phoenix”. As far as fake last names invented to bypass a dumb algorithmic flagging mechanism go, I could’ve done worse than “Phoenix”.)

One defense that Google has come out with about their ridiculous pseudonym policy is that they’re trying to establish an identity service. Leaving aside the fact that they pulled a complete bait-and-switch on their users regarding the purpose of Google Plus, and the fact that you weren’t told until it was too late that things like Google Reader would also be irrevocably tied to G+, in many ways this move dovetails nicely with the struggles that Paid Content points out regarding Android tablets.

As I pointed out in the Google customer support post from a couple of days ago, Google arguably does okay as a service company. The discrepancy between Google’s perception of itself and the public’s perception of Google arises primarily from the public’s mistaken belief that it is in Google’s best interest to cater to the public, rather than to the advertisers.

If Google Plus’ actual intention is to act as an identity service, then once again, they’re not really interested in the public as a customer base. The true customers of an identity service are the commercial organizations who need an easy way to register and authenticate a large user base. If Google manages to gain a certain degree of monopoly power over the identity management industry, then it stands to reason that increasingly companies that want to do business online will rely on Google’s internal authentication system rather than going to the trouble of creating their own internal infrastructure. See: the number of apps that already use the Google App Engines as a sign-in system.

That can only do good things for Google’s advertising revenue, which is after all its primary source of revenue.

The flip side is, of course, that Google will finally join the illustrious ranks of those companies that are trusted with credit card information so they can handle business-to-consumer transactions online. This, in turn, will theoretically boost the Android development market as well.

That’s really great in theory, but it overlooks the fact that the Android market and the advertising market require very different approaches to customer service. Android will succeed if the end user wants it to succeed, which means that the end users have to be happy with the product offering. Advertising revenue will come if you have a lot of end users to look at the ads, and it doesn’t really matter if the end users are happy or disgruntled, as long as they click on some of the blinking pictures on the side of their websites. If my analysis holds, Google is trying to use Google Plus to boost both of these separate markets.

I’m not saying that that’s in and of itself an impossible goal to accomplish, but I’m not sure if Google is fully cognizant of the different approaches that’s needed. Their hardline stance on the pseudonyms makes me believe that they’re currently only seeing the ‘advertising revenue’ side of the equation. As a social network, all the arguments in favour of pseudonyms hold true. As a marketing platform, well, Google is simply doing what any marketing entity needs to do – draw a distinction between the customers you want to attract and the customers you don’t necessarily want to go to the trouble of catering to.

Unfortunately, this also means that they’re neglecting to pay attention to their lack of competitive advantage in the app market right now. I wonder which of the two, Android or G+, will ultimately be a greater driver of business for them, and if this is going to come back to bite them later.