5 ms·
> Steve says Android is Google’s most important channel. That’s only if you don’t measure by money. From a business point of view, AdWords is five times
by IBM 9y ago
> Steve says Android is Google’s most important channel. That’s only if you don’t measure by money. From a business point of view, AdWords is five times more important than anything else.
How is AdWords the channel? It seems like the product to me, while Google Search is the vehicle for delivering them.
>My personal opinion is that Android originally existed to prevent Apple getting a monopoly lock on the hand-held market and lock Google entirely out of mobile ads.
Apple's business model doesn't lend itself to getting a monopoly lock on any business they're in. Apple was always destined to having a nice chunk of the premium market, but someone else would have sprung up to serve everyone else. It could have been Symbian, Blackberry, Microsoft, etc.
- mattnewton 9y agoI think it’s easy to look at it with hindsight and say that Apple’s positioning was inevitable, but I certainly didn’t feel that way ten or even five years ago. As is, google pays Apple already a lot of money to be the default search engine on their phones. I imagine that number could have been triple that if no credible rival emerged in the medium/high end phone space.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoThere's about a 0% chance of a company that doesn't license or open up their platform not having a credible rival, because by default, there's a huge open market they're leaving on the table. This is the same with Tesla, and why Tesla cannot be more than a niche member of the EV market in the long run. If anything, the companies we need to worry about are those who offer extensible "open" platforms that build partnerships with most of the industry, while retaining control and decisionmaking authority over them all.
- mattnewton 9y agoWhat’s wrong with a possible universe where the iPhone is the only modern smartphone, ubuntu/sailfish/Firefox rules the low end, and Tizen or something is keeping one manufacturer alive in the medium end? There are very strong network effects to an app ecosystem, and you can imagine a future where all the high end users are on iOS.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoIf Ubuntu and the like were successful with a strong ecosystem on the low end, why wouldn't they find someone to build a high end device? Companies that just... don't like profit, perhaps? Android won it's success in the budget market, and that gave it the ecosystem it needed to survive in the high end market.
- mattnewton 9y agoThe network effect is a chicken and egg problem that can’t be solved with just finding a partner. A large part of why android succeeded because it solved the chicken and egg developer - user problem by being early enough, and by having a company like google put their full support behind it. Other platforms were late to the table incompeting with iOS (windows), or didn’t have the clout of a large competent software company backing it, or both.
- esrauch 9y agoIt seems that Windows phone would have filled the Android mid-range/licensed niche if Android wasn't already established.
- dmix 9y ago> Steve says Android is Google’s most important channel. That’s only if you don’t measure by money. From a business point of view, AdWords is five times more important than anything else. Even that's misquoting Yegge, he in fact said: >> Android is probably Google’s most important channel — if not today, then certainly over the next ten years. https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/who-will-steal-android-from-google-af3622b6252e https://medium.com/@steve.yegge/who-will-steal-android-from-... He's not even saying it's a more important channel than search today but something that has the potential to be in the next decade. Additionally after rereading Yegge's post, I don't see anywhere he asserted AdWords is a channel either, which it clearly isn't. He states channels are merely a proxy for ads or it's "little sister" paid subscriptions. And when you're speaking of channels, as something entirely distinct from ads/subscriptions, then it's clear they must be things customers want: positive experiences, good content, social gratification, etc. Aka, good products. Users are not just a faceless question mark before + "impressions for ads money = profit". It takes hard work to keep users happy in order to even have the opportunity to show them ads or sell them subs. So you're entirely correct here. Google is very much in the business of customer happiness, as much as they are in the business of keeping advertisers happy on the other end. They are not merely middlemen for advertisers... they control plenty of channels. Which I believe is based in a common myth about businesses in general, popular among anti-capitalist political ideologies: that industry is only about "making money" - as if that is somehow distinct from providing value to customers. Absent a central body ala governments or in some cases monopolies, it's impossible to make money without providing value in return, aka keeping 'end-users' happy.
- peoplewindow 9y agoApple's business model doesn't lend itself to getting a monopoly lock on any business they're in. Their primary products are application platforms. How on earth do you reason that their business models don't lend themselves to lockin, when it's the exact same business model that created Microsoft?
- cc81 9y agoI think he means that Apple sells premium hardware. There will always be huge group that cannot afford that.
- peoplewindow 9y agoBy definition, if you achieve monopoly lockin you can charge whatever price you like. There are people who can't afford / would rather not pay for Windows but find they have to anyway, due to some business critical app they need. They're locked in. That's the point.
- on_and_off 9y agopremium is kinda debatable when we are talking about phones. They are heavily subsidized by the phone operators in most markets (sure you end up paying at least as much to the operator, but most people only see the upfront cost). There are always multiple generations on sale at the same time, and lower cost iterations of the current gen as well. Not to mention refurbished phones. In the USA, iOS is roughly half of the smartphone landscape. Yeah, the less costly iPhone is more costly than the cheapest Android phone, but I don't think it can be said that it is premium hardware.