Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is, like Apple, a "sell people stuff at a price they're willing to pay" company, versus a "free but we will auction slivers of your soul" company. Apple makes most of its money up front, Amazon makes most of its money... um no one is quite sure how or if Amazon makes money. Google "gives" away goods and services and makes money selling ads ... like an old fashioned TV network. Not exactly the same thing at all.

Oh, and how much net profit has Android yielded Google?

View on HN

> Oh, and how much net profit has Android yielded Google?

Probably a whole lot. When my sister, who would otherwise be in front of a computer at most half an hour a day, can get an android smartphone for 150 euros and idly browse the Web all day, Google makes a shitload of money they wouldn't have if all these people were on cheap nokias.

Don't iPhone users make just as many (probably more) Google searches as Android users? Or do you think that without Android, nobody would have put out cheap smartphones by now?

Probably more? As far as I know, there are more Android devices in the market than iPhones.

Android users are not using their devices the same as iOS users:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/real-time-research-ios-domi...

No doubt, yet iPhone still generates more mobile web traffic than Android.

But if you replaced all the android devices with iphones, Apple would have HUGE leverage over Google.

Apple charges Google for being the default search engine.

(Not implying you specifically, nor is it necessarily a bad thing...)

Interesting framing and perception - I've never read anyone say that "Mozilla charges Google for being the default Firefox search engine", it's always been "Google pays Firefox to be the default Firefox search engine".

Same result, really, but it's interesting how much of a change it implies, passive vs active, etc.

Sure, true enough. Though it's not like creating Android was free.

It's quite possible there wouldn't be cheap smartphones without Android. At least, not ones with a decent browser. Meego imploded on its own, Palm took webOS down with it as a realistic option, and MS would probably never let the word "cheap" attach itself to Windows Mobile. What's left? Openmoko, maybe? And, just as importantly, if you assume the cheap smartphone makers wouldn't gang up and make their own platform, who else might have pushed a new, free, mobile OS other than Google? Funnily enough, the only other company I can think of who might have had a go at it is Amazon. Today I could see Facebook having a go, but where were they 7 years ago?

Then again, markets are funny things. In a world without Android, I can't imagine the expensive iOS ecosystem being the only game in town. Something might have filled the sucking void at the cheap end of the market, but what?

I realise I've effectively written Symbian off here. It's funny, it took me a good 5 minutes to even remember it existed. I suppose we could hypothesise that in a world without Android, the Nokia of 2009-2010 might have seen the light, but I think that's extremely unlikely.

Licensing Windows Mobile is what? $30 a unit? Less?

So without Android isn't it safe to assume HTC would still be pumping out Windows phones, perhaps at $389 retail rather than $349?

Yeah, but at sub-$100? Probably not.

Yes but Android cost Google billions more, and occupied the limited attention of key people for years. The evidence is that most android buyers do very little web surfing.

What evidence is that then? StatCounter currently show Android to be at least as big as iOS for web hits. http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201108-20120...

Divide that by the number of owners of each platform. There's your answer. Well, there's part of your answer. Chances are that Android owners are bimodal - some (like me) do a lot of surfing, others very little.

If Android users are bi-modal then simply factoring in the number of Android handset sales is not an accurate comparison either.

It sounds like what we really want is a histogram of web usage vs number of users :)

Actually the move to mobile is hurting Google. People tend not to click on ads while searching from mobile devices as much as they do on desktops. And since people are moving to mobile, Google's ad revenue growth is getting affected.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/15/mobile-paradox/

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/12/mobile-facebook-and-google-...

And remember Google doesn't keep that 30 percent cut from the Play store -- it goes to carriers, I believe.

Citation needed.

I only found this, about limited ad revenue sharing: http://paidcontent.org/2010/03/26/419-androids-secret-sauce-...

Via Wikipedia:

http://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/bin/a...

"the remaining 30% goes to the distribution partner and operating fees."

When I read that a couple weeks ago, I assumed distribution partners meant carriers, though I guess I don't really know what it means. Also, operating fees probably means Google, so I stand corrected.

> no one is quite sure how or if Amazon makes money

I thought it was pretty clear that they're an e-commerce powerhouse.

Probably meant profit, not money. Makes a little more sense that way.

free but we will auction slivers of your soul

You must not think much of your soul if you think what they do is auctioning it off.

Oh, and how much net profit has Android yielded Google?

Android has cost billions but what if Apple and Microsoft shared the mobile market and replaced the default SE with Bing or Yahoo? That was Google's worry and that's why they spent billions for years. That huge expense was essentially hidden by filling web search pages with ads in commercial niches to the point of making them unusable. When earnings grow by double digit questions are few

Google saw that in mobile you only get a seat at the table by owning a platform demanded by customers or by being a carrier. Otherwise, you're just a feature on someone else's product–-something that can easily be swept away. You're thinking along the right lines. Google's decision to develop Android should be evaluated not by whether it has made profit to date, but by the alternatives facing Google at the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com