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Comment by wmab | Hacker News Reader

Right, Google doesn't play in the "luxury" space, they decided that strategy early on, allowing any smartphone maker to ship the Android OS. This won them the market share for operating system - currently 75% to iOS's ~24% [1], but they are unable to capture a fraction of the value that Apple did with their luxury mass-market strategy.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...

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I may be wrong, but for me it looks like it was their goal to begin with. Google analotics knew they have to chance to compete with Apple in that regard so they went with other profitable options. At least from outside it looks like a sane decision.

I wouldn't be sure of this. Google at one time was a darling of the tech world. Sure, the data collection issue has been there from the start because of the business model. But their products, engineering, openness was looked upon. Add to this their principled approach to things like when they decided to pull out of China because of their values.

The biggest qualm with Google was their incoherent product strategy like what happened with Gtalk, Reader etc.

If anyone had the brand value to push a smartphone OS, it was Google. Once Android started going mainstream, they could have chosen a different strategy for the high end models.

HN loves to riff on cancelled Google products, but Google is essentially throwing products at the market to see what sticks profitably. It's worked in the past and most consumers (outside of HN) still don't care about the failed products.

>It's worked in the past and most consumers (outside of HN) still don't care about the failed products.

I singlehandedly moved my entire extended family into the iOS space because I got tired of dealing with Google's bullshit messaging apps. I'm not going to waste my life teaching non computer literate people how Hangouts/Meets/Talk/Duo/Allo work.

WhatsApp came along and took the messaging space, while Skype and Hangouts and Talk or whatever couldn't figure it out. And Facetime was the only decent video calling option that didn't need to be troubleshooted.

It was ridiculous that I couldn't easily send a contact to anyone in the world until WhatsApp came around. Then I didn't have to worry about who had what phone, I sent them a contact in WhatsApp, they got it for free and it worked.

I am not just talking about the cancellation, I am also talking about product strategy. Like the example of Gtalk. Gtalk was interoperable, worked well and yet missed the beat of messaging apps.

Look at the messaging space now. Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage. Google should have led this space with evolution of Gtalk.

Even for users, as it used XMPP we would have had an open platform where we could have just plugged in our own favorite messaging apps with it.

Didn't GTalk become Hangouts?

That's my point though - the features that HN users find valuable (XMPP standard) are not the same as what most consumers do.

Yeah, you are right about that. My main point was just about messaging in general where Google couldn't evolve Gtalk into a smartphone era messaging app.

XMPP I consider as an advantage personally as with lock in to platforms like Messenger/WhatsApp we complain about the total control these companies have. In an XMPP world, at least you could have had more control over clients and the ability to talk to a different Jabber server from the same client app.

I agree though that the XMPP bit, no normal user cares about.

But Google's strategy isn't simply in selling phones, but in then showing ads to the users of those phones.

It is not that simple. Ad industry has a lot of money and I personally find nothing wrong with ads as such. We can argue about targeting but that's a different topic. StackOverflow does ads and they seem to really go well with the page. Even Apple tried coming into the market with iAd.

After all, ads earn them revenue. You can have product differentiation where your devices don't have to necessarily earn by ads. A very good example of this is Amazon. They have two versions of Kindle, with the ad free version costing more.

All I'm saying is that Google earns X from selling phones, Y from ads. Apple earns Z from selling phones, and 0 from ads.

GP is claiming that Apple is doing better in the phone space, because Z>X. But the appropriate comparison is not Z vs. X, but (Z+0) vs. (X+Y).

Yeah, my point was that only. You can either charge the user upfront or you can earn money with ads as the user uses the platform.

For high end devices, maybe some of the services could have been considered paid off for before and could have skipped ads. That way, even Google gets 'Z' from phones.

Amazon has a lock on the kindle store, enforced DRM, and a subscription program. That's more like iOS than Android in strategy.

Very well could have been Google's strategy in high end devices as well with charging upfront for few services in the cost of the phone itself.

This just cuts into privacy as a marketing point for iPhone.

How exactly would Google have done that as a software company and not a hardware company?

By giving it out almost-free to OEMs, Google solidified the majority marketshare as the cost leader. That is much more strategic than dumping capex into manufacturing against an already established quality brand.

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