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>What a loaded question. Whoa. Let's rephrase the question then. The parent defined better smartphone as better browsing. Let's replace iPhone with Palm Pre (o
by kaptain 16y ago
>What a loaded question.
Whoa. Let's rephrase the question then. The parent defined better smartphone as better browsing. Let's replace iPhone with Palm Pre (or something else other than an Android phone). My point isn't that the iPhone is better than the Android, my point is that I don't understand the incentive to create a smartphone that browses better than a standard phone when other companies will do it for you.
>First, Google pays Apple something like a few hundred million dollars per year to be the default search engine.
I'm not sure where you got this number. The closest number to this is here: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Google-Apple-Search-iPhone-Bing,news-5818.html http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Google-Apple-Search-iPhone-Bing,... and that's not even a quote. This is just speculation anyways. The best place to look is here: http://www.apple.com/investor/ http://www.apple.com/investor/ and analyze the reported data to see where this number might be hidden.
But let's suppose that Google didn't pay this money. Do you think that all the iPhone users would not use Google? I think that Apple would have eventually folded and just made Google the default engine, or made none of the search engines default and allowed the user to select the one they wanted. Google is clearly the search leader and it's not clear to me that Apple would wipe every trace of Google off of its phone.
>Second, I've got no idea what you're talking about with the backstabbing. Hhuh? Are you somehow insinuating that open source software invites backstabbing?
Nope. Sounds like I pushed a button here; didn't mean to. I'm saying that phone manufacturers could take advantage of the Google's investment in Android by thwarting the business purpose for Android by partnering with another search engine to fulfill the search needs for their users.
I'm not debating the merits of Android or open source. I don't understand how having it makes more money than not having it.
- Travis 16y ago>"My point isn't that the iPhone is better than the Android, my point is that I don't understand the incentive to create a smartphone that browses better than a standard phone when other companies will do it for you." Sure, companies have tried to build their own OS. They absolutely sucked. I suspect that Google understood what it took to build a mobile OS that enabled easier search. And they got so fed up by the horrid interfaces of the OEMs (seriously, remember how terrible every single one of them was?) that they jumpstarted the process. Better mobile OS = better adoption, more searched per handset. More revenue. You can either try to take a bigger piece of the pie, or make the pie bigger. Google's strategy is to make the pie bigger (and with their top of mind branding, they also get the biggest slice). Combine that with the phone manufacturers' stunning incompetence in building a decent interface, and you have the perfect situation for google to build android. The less generous side of me also realizes that google understood that the OS developer had great control over the handsets (defaults are a very powerful force). And if a competitor (say, Nokia) were to get huge adoption of a phone OS, they would naturally be drawn to build their own ad system. Just look at how Apple did with the iOS apps.