Android's Latest Ad Shows The Nightmare Of A Mono-Key Life

What if you only had one letter on your keyboard? Or what if all the keys on a piano produced only one and the same tone? Life wouldn't only be boring, it would be a nightmare of miscommunication, not to mention painful music. Some scientists would often tell of the dangers of monoculture, and Google is seemingly applying that same line of thinking for its latest marketing push for Android, playing, almost literally, on its slogan of being together but not really the same.

What if all 88 keys of a piano sounded the same? Google went to great lengths to find out and prove its point, modifying a (expensive) grand piano so that all those keys, no matter what you do, will only produce one, single sound. And then they let loose an expert pianist to try and play the same piece on a regular piano as well as the modified one. The results are what you would expect, but is still eerie when you actually hear it.

And to further hammer down the point, Google went crazy over at its Twitter account, spouting tweets with nothing but 'c', and some spaces, in them. It was trying to emphasize how the letter 'c', without the rest of the alphabet, would make tweets boring. Nevermind boring, they're completely unintelligible. (The latter tweets would "reveal" what were "hidden" underneath those c's)

Google's "Not the Same" campaign for Android celebrates the diversity of devices, features, and even experiences of its mobile platform. A start contrast to Apple's one and only flavor and one and only set of devices. It is really just a modern way of saying "in diversity, there is beauty and strength".

That said, aphorisms like that aren't absolute truths. Android does indeed trump Apple when it comes to choices, especially when budget is involved. But those difference can also come at a price. Fragmentation is one of the biggest criticisms about Android as a platform, which eventually leads to the difficulty in getting critical security fixes out. It doesn't have to be difficult, of course, but it is something Google and its partners have to figure out quickly without losing that beauty of diversity.