How Google Bought Android -- According To Folks in the Room (arstechnica.com) 32
Chet Haase, who worked at several Silicon Valley tech companies and in 2010 joined the Android engineering team at Google and watched Android rise from the bottom of the smartphone field to where it is today, writes in a new book: The final part of the pitch (and the most important part, for the VCs they were pitching to) was how Android was going to make money. The open source platform described in the slides is essentially what the Android team eventually built and shipped. But if that was all there was, the company would not have been worth funding for VCs. Developing and giving away an open source platform sounds great from a save-the-world standpoint, but where's the payoff? Where's the upside for investors? That is, how did Android plan to make money off of a product that they planned to simply give away? Venture capitalists fund companies that they hope will make more (far more) than their investment back.
The path to revenue was clear for the other platform companies in the game. Microsoft made money by licensing its platform to Windows Phone partners; every phone sold contributed a per-device cost back to Microsoft. RIM made money both on the handsets they sold as well as the lucrative service contracts that their loyal enterprise customers signed up for. Nokia and the other Symbian adopters made money by selling the phones that they manufactured with variations of that operating system. Similarly, all of the other handset manufacturers funded their own software development through the revenue generated by the phones they sold.
So what was Android's play that would fund the development of this awesome platform that they had yet to build and which they would give away free to other manufacturers to build their own devices? Carrier services.
Carriers would provide applications, contacts, and other cloud-based data services to their customers for Android-based handsets. The carriers would pay Android for providing these services. Swetland explained: "Rather than running and hosting the services [like Danger did for its Hiptop phones], we would build the services and sell them to the carriers." (In fact, the system that the team eventually built and shipped stayed true to the vision laid out in the pitch deck, except for this part about revenue from carrier services, which went away entirely.)
The path to revenue was clear for the other platform companies in the game. Microsoft made money by licensing its platform to Windows Phone partners; every phone sold contributed a per-device cost back to Microsoft. RIM made money both on the handsets they sold as well as the lucrative service contracts that their loyal enterprise customers signed up for. Nokia and the other Symbian adopters made money by selling the phones that they manufactured with variations of that operating system. Similarly, all of the other handset manufacturers funded their own software development through the revenue generated by the phones they sold.
So what was Android's play that would fund the development of this awesome platform that they had yet to build and which they would give away free to other manufacturers to build their own devices? Carrier services.
Carriers would provide applications, contacts, and other cloud-based data services to their customers for Android-based handsets. The carriers would pay Android for providing these services. Swetland explained: "Rather than running and hosting the services [like Danger did for its Hiptop phones], we would build the services and sell them to the carriers." (In fact, the system that the team eventually built and shipped stayed true to the vision laid out in the pitch deck, except for this part about revenue from carrier services, which went away entirely.)
All google cares about is traffic they can monitor (Score:4, Insightful)
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Pretty much this.
Even though MS had a 12 year head start with WinCE [wikipedia.org] (1996) Google managed to ship Android in 2008.
Who knew that Linux would end up running on over 2+ Billion devices AND 100% of the Top 500 supercomputers!
I wonder if going with *BSD would have had any impact? I doubt it but who knows?
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I'd argue Apple's IOS is a BSD
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Yes, and that's probably a good example that either Linux or BSD would have worked.
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I suspect any general purpose OS kernel would have worked.
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I suspect that anything not from Microsoft would have worked. And it did!
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I suspect that anything not from Microsoft would have worked.
There is no Hurd phone.
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I wonder if going with *BSD would have had any impact? I doubt it but who knows?
I would say any kernel would have worked. As far as Android is concerned the kernel doesn't really matter outside of the manufacturers of the SoCs providing drivers for it and they would provide drivers for whatever kernel the smartphone manufacturers and Google required.
Remarkable that it worked (Score:2)
For example one could posit that Microsoft failed because they forced mobile to be dependent on the desktop, since they didn't want Wintel to lose prominence (as it subsequently has).
OK, so why not Palm? Symbian?
Then again I thought 1.6B was an awful lot for google's acquisition of Youtube, lol.
Re: Remarkable that it worked (Score:4, Insightful)
Developers, developers, developers. The Play Store gave commercial developers an easy way to make profit, the platform gave open source developers a like-minded ecosystem, and the SDK was leaps and bounds past what Symbian or RIM was offering. More developers lead tg more apps. More apps lead to more customers.
The rest is just network effects.
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Much as I hate the expression, it's completely valid in this case. It was usually not a huge problem either to develop new Android apps, or port iOS ones. And in the beginning, given the choice between Objective-C versus Java (pre-Swift and pre-Kotlin), there wasn't really much of a contest.
Also, as hinted at by a few other posts: the OS was likely never meant to make a profit; it was likely intended from the beginning as a way to build an all-encompassing surveillance platform.
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Also, as hinted at by a few other posts: the OS was likely never meant to make a profit; it was likely intended from the beginning as a way to build an all-encompassing surveillance platform.
I certainly agree with that, google knew that this was a new frontier that they needed to make sure they were front and centre. It makes sense for them, as they had to make sure that the product that was making them money, google search, remained making them money. Having any alternative dominate, would have pushed something else to displace google's products.
I think this attitude was seen with google choosing to not support windows phone. I think they were really afraid of it, but they knew that youtube wa
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It was also open source and free. Which was a huge deal.
Every handset Nokia sold, they had to pay a license fee to Microsoft. Google charges no license fee for Android, it is free. When you're talking about tens of millions of handsets that adds up.
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MS in the phone space shot themselves a few times. Windows Phone 7 saw some notable interest, and had some momentum with it, but when they rebooted and lost forwards compatibility with Windows Phone 8, a lot of those WP7 devs basically saw no financial benefit to update their apps, or improve anything. To make matters worse, they repeated the same thing with Windows 10 Mobile, again, devices lost forwards compatibility. Whether any alternative strategy would have survived is academic at this point, but MS r
Re: Remarkable that it worked (Score:2)
Re:Remarkable that it worked (Score:5, Interesting)
1) the iPhone crushed all of the other services in the market place with a well designed intuitive interface (which is Apple's core strength) and with the App marketplace of 3rd party apps. The major things Apple did differently was first realize that a phone is software, not hardware, and that freed their hardware to be elegant for all the other apps on the phone. The second was they had a pre-seeded market of iPod/iTunes users who loved the Apple brand. When they launched a phone, all those fans realized they could now move their music to a device that ALSO browsed the internet, did phone calls, and GPS. That gave Apple a very large user base, which incentivized 3rd party developers to develop towards Apple and not Symbian or Palm.
2) Android was not going to succeed until Google bought it. But what Google did was offer it for free (in a totally stripped down way), and charge people for the Google play store. Google used it's heft and brand as Google to say they're just as competitive as the App Store/iTunes store, and by giving every phone maker a well designed, relatively free OS that came with the Google Play store, then as a phone maker you don't have to overcome the hurdle of having a large user base to encourage app developers to develop for your platform; Google provides that. You just need to make a good phone and install Android on it and you get the Play store community.
This is the same thing with game consoles and other hardware that relies on 3rd party developers; you need a large enough community base to encourage developers to develop there. That's why every console launches with launch titles and exclusives; Halo is designed to build the XBox community that encourages 3rd party game developers to launch on thier platform. But building that community is very hard and very tricky and more about branding than it is about technicalities. But now if you're a smaller smartphone developer, you launch with Android and you have the entire Play Store at your disposal. That's why Android was successful.
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> I still don't really understand why google succeeded with Android where all others except Apple failed.
I've wondered that too. I think there are a few factors:
* Being able to re-invest the millions they were making off of search into dedicated hardware.
* Branding / reputation. None of the mobile OEMs were very big --> trusted to be long term by developers so that effectively ruled them out. That left very few players.
* Having an "name brand" open-source OS. With Google embracing Linux I think th
Re:Remarkable that it worked (Score:5, Informative)
Windows Phone: good hardware, decent UI, but too expensive, too late, and no Microsoft Office capability (or any other apps, when everyone wanted apps).
Palm: sweet OS, but they tried to make their own hardware, and didn't have a strong sales network. Go to the AT&T store and no one would try to sell you a Palm device.
Symbian: App development was awkward, UI was awkward (I'm sure some people will disagree)
Blackberry: Made their own hardware, so every other phone company competed against them. Their code wasn't flexible enough to handle the UI improvements that came out with the iPhone.
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You must have a much different definition of "succeeded" than me, because WinCE as PocketPC, SymbianOS, PalmOS an
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More important still, its navigation was intuitive - you poked at it with your finger, not a stylus.
This was the industry-changing feature. All the other phones at the time were either not touch (navigating around was via clunky arrow keys), or resistive touch, which was not comfortable or accurate to use with a finger, and the screens got worn out quickly. The iPhone wasn't the first to use the capacitive screen, but there were only a couple of months away from first, and they had a fan base to go with it, so it worked out well for them.
In terms of features, it was mostly inferior to everything else that
The original business plan failed (Score:2)
They thought they would make money off an app store. The investors actually made money by selling to Google, who did not need to make money directly.
There is a lot of random luck in this, being in the right place at the right time, giving it a go without knowing quite why, sometimes combined with competent engineering.
And of course ossified management has killed many companies in a changing market. e.g. the internet should have been gold for newspapers that had owned the classified ad business.
Apple stuf
Android had a miststart. (Score:3)
I remember when Android was released earlier, before the Apple iPhone, it was designed for a button phone, or with just a single touch display. As that was the technology at the time. I don't think if Apple had released the iPhone with its Multi-Touch Display, Android probably wouldn't be able to compete against all the Phone OS makers. As they were OS's very tightly integrated into their products, while Android was more open design could be ported faster and easier making a lot of phone makers when seeing Apple iPhone to make the Me-Too phones, Android was the best option, because it was a heck of a lot easier to use android, than to make their Own OS, for a possible big failure.
Phone Makers trying to compete with Apple which had Failed, Palm (with WebOS) and RIM (with Backberry OS) really didn't last too long, with their own OS. While the device makers Going with Android had a much better product run.
Back in 2007 Android was just an other Linux for Mobile distribution, While backed with Big Google Money which made it more professional, it was still kinda on target to just be a hackers toy, and the occasional product failure.
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Android still can't scroll without lagging or dropping frames. And it gets slower over time for inexplicable reasons. And wakelocks inconsistently wreck standby battery life.
So that explains carrier/handset cruft (Score:2)
My first Android - an OG Moto Droid from Verizon, had so much Verizon and Moto junk I was regularly uninstalling apps I actually used in order to try something else (I occasionally had to uninstall something just to update apps. 8GB was not enough)
My next was supposedly going to be less crufty: A Nexus phone should have been clean, but the Galaxy Nexus again had Verizon and Samsung cruft.
But now that there are decent, unlocked, cruftless phones (e.g. Pixel, anything Android One like Nokia), how is Android m
Re:So that explains carrier/handset cruft (Score:5, Informative)
how is Android making money now?
They take 30% of all app sales, among other things.
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I'd say they take far more, because they rob your privacy and whore it off.
Unique Selling Position (Score:2)
Android was competing against Web 2.0 (with JavaME) and Japan's iNet model which had the same monetization plan. They stagnated while Android moved to compete against the iPhone, creating a selling position that attracted software developers.
A focus on per-user and per-application licensing causes the death of many technology start-ups.
It didn't go away. (Score:1)
It's a bit that pre-installed crap you get with your phone.
And it's a lot your privacy that is whored away.