On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 14:22:22 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
I also think we should add to this discussion that Google was
hellbent on going forward with Android even when it was clearly
inferior. Apple tried to squish out Google's services from
their iOS products for a while. And that is exactly what Google
tries to prevent by funding things like Chrome and Android.
Do you blame them, given such anti-competitive measures long
undertaken by MS and Apple?
So for Google Chrome and Android does not have to make sense in
business terms, it is basically an anti-competitive tool to
protect their own hegemony (relative monopoly) by retaining
critical mass and making it difficult for competitors to build
up a competing product over time (you need a source of income
while your product is evolving from mediocre to great to do
that).
There is some truth to this, but if you cannot compete with a
free product- cough, cough, Windows Mobile- I don't know what to
tell you. In other words, google cannot afford to spend a
fraction of the money on Android that Apple spends on iOS,
because google makes so little money off of Android by
comparison, so there are disadvantages to their free model too.
It is one of the reasons why they have now plunged into the
high-end smartphone market with their recent Pixel line.
I think the lack of a viable business model for Android vendors,
other than Samsung, is a huge problem for the platform, as Apple
hoovers up two-thirds of the profit with only a tenth of the
phones sold:
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/80-of-global-handset-profits-comes-from-premium-segment/
As I said earlier, the mobile OS story is not over yet, there are
more changes to come.
