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How does Google make money from Android?

本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛How does Google make money from Android?
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15 Answers
Brandon Smietana
Brandon Smietana, Founder of Symbolic Analytics
Upvoted by Aaron Ligon, I worked as an analyst at Google from 2007 through 2009
Mobile internet users will surpass desktop internet usage within 20 months at the current rate. Mobile is the largest growth market for advertising.

Google is not attempting to and cannot monetize Android directly. Rather Android is an open platform that reduces the fragmentation in the mobile market for applications.

If Google did not come in and create an open platform, we would see the emergence of several closed platforms controlled by companies whose interests are counter to Google's. The carriers, Apple, Microsoft and so on. Apple has built a closed platform and dominated it in the same way that Microsoft has dominated the desktop OS market. Apple has to approve or deny you applications. Apple tells you what applications you can run. Apple tells you what language the applications have to be written in. Apple is now the only advertising network that can use geolocation data for targeting advertising on its platform. And so on.

It is in Google's best interest to have a mobile internet running an on open architecture which is not strongly controlled by any single interest, rather than to have a number of fragmented platforms controlled by competitors competing to have the next Microsoft type monopoly over mobile. For instance, look at the difficulty that Google has had in getting its Chrome browser and Google Voice application approved by Apple.

When you build your company on top of a platform that another company controls, the controlling interest will extract rents from you. This is merely economic history.

For instance, what if Microsoft started paying cell phone carriers to offer mobile phones and package Bing as the default search engine on these phones, similar to the way operating systems licenses are negotiated with desktop OEM manufacturers. What would happen if Apple's exclusive agreement with AT&T expired and Apple decided to subsidize the iPhone at $100 price point and monetize through their advertising platform? What if a consumer had a choice between an iPhone and a generic Nokia phone when their contract was up for renewal? Without a viable alternative platform, Apple would achieve dominate market share and be in a position to lock Google out of most of the mobile market.

The carriers are in price competition and attempting to maintain margins by differentiating based upon service level and branding. When you look at the cellular market, its clear that not developing Android would have been suicide for Google. Even with Android there is little reason to believe that Google's dominance of search and advertising would naturally extend itself to the mobile market without significant effort on Google's part.更多精彩文章及讨论,请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
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