Google has other agendas than profiting from the sale of phones. They have an application store, a music store, a movie store, and a book store, for starters.

Google has other agendas than profiting from the sale of phones. They have an application store, a music store, a movie store, and a book store, for starters. They also have an ad business which gets to safely live on the most popular smartphone OS without real risk of it being shut down for competitive reasons. They have a massive lever with which to move other projects as well. They have millions of users of their maps program on mobile, for example. They get voice search data. They get people doing searches. They get many more Gmail subscribers. Soon those millions will be nudged toward using G+ because it comes on their phone and offers some nice benefits. As for whether or not Android is here to stay, there's a measure of user lock-in just like there is with the iPhone. You already have your applications and media that you have paid for. And according to most everyone, their latest version of the OS is a marked step forward, bringing Android's weak points up close to parity with iOS while continuing to build upon the relative strengths that have been there for the past few major releases. Microsoft may gain traction with their phone and ecosystem, but I'm not sure why that's any reason to forecast that Android will go the way of Netscape.