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Comment by AbrahamParangi | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft and Apple are platform companies. Each product is intended to reinforce and expand the platform, and you see this reflected in that both companies have a diverse mixture of revenue sources. I think we can understand these companies as fundamentally having a strategy where the goal is to reinforce the value prop of "building on Microsoft" or "living on Apple".

Google, however, is much more of a one-hit-wonder from a revenue perspective. While Google has had many societally impactful products, they mostly do not move the needle on revenue. Google's revenue is 80% ads and 75% of that ad revenue is from search ads.

I think the implication of this is that because Google doesn't make money from their interlocking services but rather from their near-monopoly on search ads, the incentives for them to actually behave like Microsoft and Apple (where you can trust long term support) just aren't there.

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80% revenue from search advertising is not entirely exact.

the revenue of google was 279.8 billion in 2022 [1]

GCP made 26.28 billion in 2022 [2] Google play made 42.3 billion revenue [3]

There are probably some other non-search add revenue streams besides these two, I am not too familiar with google - but 'one hit wonder' isn't entirely exact.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/478176/google-public-clo...

[3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/

I didn’t say they were a one-hit wonder I said “more of a one-hit wonder”

Google is more concentrated than Apple and Microsoft and their ancillary offerings are less synergistic with their main offering.

Only Facebook has a more obviously concentrated revenue stream - but Google is a close second. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-tech-giants-make-billio... is enlightening.

android is driving search, they have google as the default search engine - so there is some synergy here.

It's probably 80% of profits, given those other things don't have as good margins. The number you site says $42.3 B was spent on the app store. Of that Google usually takes like a 30% cut. And it has overhead etc.

What about Android? That would make google a platform company.

Also, arent 'ads' a stand-in for paying for a service? Google has search and youtube. They find niches where they can place ads in places that people typically won't be willing to pay for. I don't want to pay 1 cent to view some website that might be garbage, but I'd be willing to waste 5 seconds scrolling past an ad. However, they have shown that people will pay for streaming services, something people know is valuable.(And they also have free/ad based options)

It just seems that people are caught up on Ads, which is really just the payment method you use to access google services.

(Also 80% is a common pareto thing, Apple gets ~80% of their revenue through various iphone/ios channels. Apple's one hit wonder is the iphone. Its not exactly something to nitpick)

Google have Android. is Android not a platform like Windows/IOS ? its used on phone expand to tablet and Chromebook.

"Android has an incredible 97 percent market share in India".

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/androids-new-oem-rul...

Android is strange.

Google and the phone vendors only take on half the responsibility of publishing an operating system as you are pretty lucky if you get software updates never mind the kind of major updates an iOS device gets.

It is exhausting to explain to people how to scan a QR code on Android because the built in camera app doesn’t do it so they have to go to the app store and download some free QR reader that looks like spamscam and have a slightly different name every time you try it. (And no giving them a QR code to get the app.)

That’s the inattention to detail that pervades the platform and it is made worse by the outright vandalism of Samsung or Verizon filling up your home screen with lots of twisty little app icons that all look alike and certainly don’t lead anywhere you’d want to go.

Google doesn’t get paid for Android, Asian companies in corrupt economies seem to lose money making Android phones but there is some social status to be had by being a leader in 21st century technology so they do it anyway. Apple probably profits more from Android because Android keeps them out of trouble with antitrust regulators but Android is a ‘spoiler’ that keeps any real competitive OS out of the market.

Hypothetically Android keeps mobile safe for advertising but it is possible Google could be selling as many ads on somebody else’s OS without the expense and moral hazard of keeping a zombie OS ‘alive’.

They make money on it by forcing Android phone manufacturers to include the Chrome and the Google Play Store. The Play Store is the dominant Android App Store and it makes Google a nice chunk of money. It's not nearly as good as search, but way better than say Twitter.

When I say they’re not a platform company, I mean that they aren’t paid to be one. No doubt they have many, very impactful products, but that’s not how they make their money and thus not the incentive of the business.

Does Google really have Android though? Android is open source with a flexible enough license that if Google ever tried to tighten their grip too much, they'd lose the dev community quickly. They own the Play store and Google services, but you can create an AOSP device (a non Play/Google services device) with no issues, and some chinese/low-end players already do that exactly to avoid some of the licensing costs and requirements.

They may have had a very good handle on Android talent in the start, but now every facet of Android engineering has a non negligible community outside of Google.

I'm not saying it's like Google has nothing, but their position in the Android universe is one or two bad moves away from slipping from their grip at any moment. It's not a hard link like Apple's.

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