Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloisant | Hacker News Reader

Except for Amazon, that would still be extremely successful without AWS, the others had their original business model disrupted.

So far Google still have a stronghold on search, they've been able to secure it with Android and Chrome by controlling the devices, they seem to be doing fine.

View on HN

Android (profit of $23 billion from 2010-2016) hasn’t really done that great for Google. They still have to pay Apple a reported $12 billion a year+ to be the default search engine for iOS devices.

Apple’s business model has always been to sell “computers” at high margins. They had record Mac revenues last quarter. All of their other devices are just computers with different form factors running a variant of the same OS, most with a variant of the same processor.

Office and Windows have been the main driver for MS for over 25 years.

A primary benefit of Android is that Google is allowed to put their search engine on Android mobile devices for close to free instead of multiple billions of dollars.

If Apple customers are the most affluent and are worth at least $12 billion a year to Google, how much are the statistically less affluent Android users really worth?

How much are customers buying $200 phones worth to advertisers compared to customers paying 3 times as much?

Google also has to pay third party Android OEMs a share of search revenue.

I would imagine a lot of it is mindshare. Apple is trendy and had already called their bluff once and made Bing the default search engine for a time.

Google pays Apple to make Google the search engine on the iPhone for the same reason that Coca Cola and Anheiseur-Busch spend tens of millions per year on 30 second spots during the Super Bowl.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com