Comment by scarface74
4 years ago
This isn’t Google being “evil” just incompetent. During their entire history, they’ve had one successful product - advertising.
No Android has not been a financial success. It came out in the Oracle trial that Android had only made Google $27 Billion in profit from its inception through the trial start date.
For comparison, Google pays Apple a reported $14 Billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS devices. Apple makes more in mobile from Google than Google makes from Android.
Android has immeasurable value, by way of ensuring Google didn't get locked out of the mobile ecosystem. What happens to Chrome's market share without being a default on one of the most used operating systems in the world? How about Google's traffic data for Google Maps without billions of devices they own reporting in every 60 seconds?
Android's value may not be easy to measure, but it's worth in building and maintaining Google's moat positively boggles the mind.
Google is locked out the ecosystem of people who actually have money to spend. How else do you explain how they are willing to pay a competitor $14 billion+ a year?
It doesn’t matter that Android is running on a bunch of $100 phones where they are getting a low ARPU. The Oracle trial showed how little profit came from Android.
Who do you think business would rather target iPhone users or Android users?
Not a fan of Google, but
> How else do you explain how they are willing to pay a competitor $14 billion+ a year?
Obvious that they have more than >14B+ value extracted out of their competitor's ecosystem per year? I am not sure if you are aware of this or not but when Apple screwed FB with all the anti-tracking changes, there was one notable exception - the browser. Guess who benefited the most? All the ad dollars, which used to be spent on FB and other user-targeting based ad products, are now being diverted to search ads. Just read Google's earnings report - YT revenue declined while Search Ads revenue shot up.
> Who do you think business would rather target iPhone users or Android users?
Think 2-3 steps ahead. How do businesses target users? Via ads in a significant way. If they cannot target iPhone users anymore based on user data, what do you think they will use instead? The next best thing they know - Search Ads. Btw this is why you will Apple and Amazon's ad revenue surging as well.
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I have money to spend. What's your suggestion as an alternative to Android that isn't an Apple product (something I have no desire to have any more of in my life)?
Incompetence that leads to accusing a caring father of distributing CP seems “evil” to me.
And I usually find myself on your side of these discussion, trying to avoid hyperbole. I don’t think ‘evil’ is hyperbolic in this case.
Google has never been focused on the end user like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. All three of them live and die by customer service. But Google could care less about the end user.
Standard disclaimer; I work for AWS.
Microsoft has never cared about end users either. They of course focused on them, but only as far as how much money they could extract, and that didn't mean keeping them happy. The customers were locked-in to their monopoly OS, so why would they care about customer happiness?