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Comment by pbiggar | Hacker News Reader

This looks to me like a pure "commoditize your complements" play. All of Google's products require great mobile internet everywhere. By getting involved in that market, they can help make it much more competitive (at the moment, cell reception is expensive and shit).

It's like Google Code. Google didn't particularly want to be in that business, but Sourceforge was complete shit, and the open source ecosystem was key to their business. So they competed, seriously improved on the status quo, and when something better came along (github), they backed away, job done.

So leading this market doesn't matter to google. If they got completely outcompeted, I'd say they'd be delighted.

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Spot on. Google Fi/Fiber both seeks to improve network connectivity for as many people as possible by accelerating competition from the incumbents (AT&T, Comcast, etc). When that happens, everyone benefits, including Google.

Other projects in this space include Android One and Loon.

I agree, and I always figured that's why they built Chrome. They needed the other browsers to step up their game, especially js performance so they could offer the kinds of web applications they wanted to.

And then .. no one did and now we're all stuck with Chrome.

Quite the contrary. The other browsers did greatly improve their game. However, Google got spoiled with their ability to add a new feature to the browser whenever a Google product would benefit.

The cynical take on this is that Google just wanted to increase lock-in to its own browser; however, I think it's more a case that Chrome is a runtime environment for Google products as much as it is a web browser.

Hmm, if this is true, then we should be able to expect similar changes in Chrome like the changes made in Acrobat Reader when Adobe thought they had complete lock-in in the PDF reader space.

Yes they did. Firefox, Safari, IE all stepped up their game. Mozilla is building Servo. Microsoft is building project spartan. The browser is incredibly competitive.

In fact that is their stated reason for developing Chrome.

The reason they built Chrome isn't just that - google pays/paid other browser vendors __hundreds of millions of dollars__ to be the default search providers ($300M to Mozilla per year for a while). Owning the web browser gives them tremendous power and saves them money.

I remember reading that they spent $100m on advertising chrome in one quarter, just in the UK. So I don't think $300m/yr really matters that much. I think with Chrome they were far more concerned about the risk of losing the default position for searches in Firefox (correctly, as it turned out!)

>>They needed the other browsers to step up their game, especially js performance so they could offer the kinds of web applications they wanted to.

The actual reason is they have to pay browser vendors like Firefox hundreds of millions of dollars for having Google search as their default search plugin. Plus, they are at the mercy of other companies if they decide to change the default search plugin. All this plus the mobile game, if you have a browser and that has a major market share you can be rest assured to send the traffic to your sites.

Same with android, as long as you have your stuff(OS, Browser) installed on other people devices, getting traffic from their is easier. Which is why they give it away for free. Have a big market share and you win by default.

Same with the new Pixel. A device to inspire Chromebook makers to make better, more powerful Chromebooks. And they (Google) themselves said that they don't aim to sell a ton of Pixels and make a lot of money out of it. I think they do it fairly.

Wasn't that the case with Nexus phones as well? If I remember correctly, Nexus One was partially built to show other manufacturers that a top of the line device can be built and ran on Android.

Yes. See also Google Fiber. AT&T and Comcast are both scrambling to launch ahead of Google in my area.

That's an incredibly optimistic way of looking at what's going on.

Power corrupts...

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