Whenever Google puts out a product, you can bet your bottom dollar the comments will be dominated by the cynical view that every product Google releases is some

Whenever Google puts out a product, you can bet your bottom dollar the comments will be dominated by the cynical view that every product Google releases is somehow the product of a group of shady, hunched-over people with wild eyes rubbing their hands together and saying "How do we get even more data out of people?" "I've got it!" "cackling." This comment is not like that. In the interest of varying the discussion, here's an alternate interpretation. Google produces Android, which is a platform. The platform business model is well understood: gain a toehold by making a product that provides some fundamental service (telephony, mobile internet, app store), then expand the value of your platform by covering the long tail of things people might find useful (Keep, the new camera app, the various rollouts mobile versions of well-known Google products). This if why Google Keep exists. Let's say Keep has 10 engineers working on it. Imagine the impact those ten people can have: Android has an addressable market of well over a billion handsets. If you apply standard shitty-startup-business-plan logic, capturing even one percent of them is a significant user base. And they don't even need to worry about revenue because the advertising business is literally printing money! It almost makes you envy them for working at such a large company.