4 ms·

What a lot of people fail to realize is that a fair amount of Google's products are defensive in nature. Google didn't launch Android to make money: they launch

What a lot of people fail to realize is that a fair amount of Google's products are defensive in nature. Google didn't launch Android to make money: they launched it to protect themselves from the threat that having a closed single-vendor provider of mobile OSes would have near-complete control in directing users to search engines. And viewed that way, Android is a roaring success: it has successfully left the mobile gateway open as a flourishing competitive market between platforms, guaranteeing that search doesn't get whacked by someone in complete control. Similarly, this is why Google funded Firefox for a long time, and then finally waded in themselves with Chrome. If IE had dominated, they were in potential trouble that Msft (ignoring antitrust issues) could down them with an MSN-search default. And so comes in Chrome-OS: to ensure that yet another platform remains neutral so that search isn't a casualty of hold-up. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-up_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-up_problem) It's okay to be a one-trick pony if the one-trick is a massive need for loads of users and is nice and profitable. I don't call Arcelor-Mittal a one trick pony because they only make steel, or Boeing a one trick pony because they only make planes. Search is enough. The rest is defense.

kenjackson 16y ago
But it is a potential house of cards. If search goes then everything falls with it. Even Android is absolutely, hands-down, the best in market, without super strong search revenue it becomes s loss center. The same with Gmail as they probably can't fund it simply by the ads on gmail -- it's their search network that makes ads on gmail a value ad. It's almost the inverse of the MS strategy. MS is using their cash from Windows/Office/Servers to try to find another billion dollar business. While Google is using these other products to expand their existing billion dollar business. If I were Google, I'd be thinking that I'd like to have one product that could pay for itself (that is, if I lost all search revenue, could it still make money). Because if Apple runs the tables, they could very well choke off Google's air supply to search, and see the whole house of cards fall. And frankly, I think Apple would be all too pleased to do so.
cal5k 16y ago
Well said. We will always need to find things in a vast sea of information.

kenjackson 16y ago

But it is a potential house of cards. If search goes then everything falls with it. Even Android is absolutely, hands-down, the best in market, without super strong search revenue it becomes s loss center. The same with Gmail as they probably can't fund it simply by the ads on gmail -- it's their search network that makes ads on gmail a value ad. It's almost the inverse of the MS strategy. MS is using their cash from Windows/Office/Servers to try to find another billion dollar business. While Google is using these other products to expand their existing billion dollar business. If I were Google, I'd be thinking that I'd like to have one product that could pay for itself (that is, if I lost all search revenue, could it still make money). Because if Apple runs the tables, they could very well choke off Google's air supply to search, and see the whole house of cards fall. And frankly, I think Apple would be all too pleased to do so.

cal5k 16y ago

Well said. We will always need to find things in a vast sea of information.