> If you think about what information they have about somebody using their services (Search, GMail, Voice, Reader, Blogger, Maps, Shopper, Books, Finance, YouTu

> If you think about what information they have about somebody using their services (Search, GMail, Voice, Reader, Blogger, Maps, Shopper, Books, Finance, YouTube, News, Picasa, etc.) adding mobile to that set of data is the obvious next-step to ensure they know as much about their users as possible. It's all about the information, and who controls it. For these services, Google can't be dislodged because another entity can't come in and grab the code that harvests that information. But I don't think that's the case for Android; someone could rewrite the code so that Google doesn't get this information. In reading some comments, I get the feeling that people think we are debating the technical merits of Android. The question really is: How much does Google make/lose because it is developing Android? The fact that your would-be competitors can prevent you from gathering user information (which was the very reason for the creation of this project) doesn't make sense. This is one business strike against developing Android. In this article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/15/google-android-money/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/15/google-android-money/ there's an interesting quote: > Schmidt called Android “probably the largest single platform play in the market today.” And going forward, he thinks that’s only going to increase as more and more people buy smartphones. At the same time, “in the open source approach, that means we give the software away, which is always paradoxical. People say, well how do you make money from that?,” Schmidt was quick to jump to. “The evidence we have is that people who use Android search twice as much as everything else,” Schmidt continued. “So, clearly, there is more revenue associated with those searches.” But Eric Schmidt is NOT saying that they are making twice as much money off of people who use Android. And there's also no data to measure how much people would be searching if Android didn't exist. Do people who use WebOS search twice as much as everything else? What about people that use iOS? What about people that use Symbian? Etc. If people would have searched twice as everything else on other platforms, then that takes away a lot of the business justification for Android: Google would have gotten their doubled-search without doing anything. This is another business strike.