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Comment by napierzaza | Hacker News Reader

Yes, you're right. All of this is going to the third world. What? Don't start believing that Android is CHARITABLE. It's a different business model. And this patent case is just a bunch of huge companies suing each-other. None of these companies is any more charitable than the other really. Has Google not done enough gray things for you to realize this yet?

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Android, as an operating system created by Android, Inc. and incubated and promoted by Google, is not "charitable" per se, but that's not the point that martythemaniak is making. As a free, open-source piece of software, it effectively acts as a lubricant in the consumer electronics market. By eliminating the manufacturer's cost of building a device's operating system, Google have made it more affordable for both device manufacturers and consumers to effect smart mobile device transactions. So while it may not be strictly financially "charitable" for Google to do this, if we account for the non-financial value of these transactions, I think it's fair to say that an enormous amount of wealth has been created above and beyond what would otherwise have happened in a market that was only dominated by devices running non-free software, especially in countries that have populations that are generally too poor to afford the iPhone.

The manufactures that put Android on their devices are not mom and pop electronics firms. So the implication that this is somehow shifting money to poorer people is kind of ridiculous. Unless you mean the top 1% richest people in those countries. Because I don't think the manufacturers will go to their labourers and pay them any more money just because some hardware was designed in house (hardware design doesn't employ many people either).

It's not Tom's shoes. In fact I find it hard to believe that even Tom's shoes are Tom's shoes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g

> The manufactures that put Android on their devices are not mom and pop electronics firms

And this has no effect on treeface's reasoning

> the implication that this is somehow shifting money to poorer people is kind of ridiculous.

Again, there is no implication money is shifting hands.

What treeface said is that a massive amount of value is being generated by lowering the cost of building smartphones, thus reducing prices and allowing more people to use them and (he/she didn't say that) by offering a convenient standard software writers can write against, creating a market larger and less fragmented than any other player had managed to create.

Again, there is no implication money is shifting hands.

"It's actually a transfer of wealth from the coffers of Apple, RIM and MS to mostly developing-nation consumers..." --http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2777354

Wealth is not money. Money is just a store of wealth.

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Money is a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money#Functions

That's not the comment you replied to.

Are consumers in third world countries really saving tons of money on android? Anyone with subsistence living won't buy a smart phone. You're inevitably implying that you're saving the money of someone middle class somewhere. Hardly as noble as you might have thought originally.

These companies are much more ethically inert than you think. It's just a new sort of marketing that uses the lifestyles of the CEO's or the employees as a selling point. The change in economics, or straight out charitable donations as a selling point.

Android is shifting things for certain, but it's not one laptop per child.

Here in India, I was able to get an Android smart phone for half the price of an iPhone. I can also build Android apps on my Debian Linux machine without incurring any additional costs.

The fact that the devices cost lesser(even before the phone company subsidizes it) and yet have GPS and an accelerometer enables me to at least attempt certain kinds of applications that target the mass market here in India.

Also, the ability to read the source code allows me to learn about a smartphone operating system in the same way I got know about a PC operating system by reading Linux's source code.

I would never want Android to be like OLPC. Android is more like a free market. OLPC was charity.

Apple has every right to protect its intellectual property. I think it is equally important for Americans to debate about, and review, the American patent system (where required).

Overall, if HTC can pay royalties to MS, then I guess they can do the same with Apple.

If it gets that far, the question is whether Apple will let HTC pay royalties or will they refuse to sell a license at any price?

Here in Vietnam I see tons of people with smartphones, and more Android than iPhone. Most of these people are living on well under $1000 USD a month.

There is a lot of middle-class people in the third world. Also, don't forget every market benefits from cheaper smarter phones and a software stack everyone can contribute to and benefit from is a huge gain in efficiency.

Motivation and effect are different things. Whenever (simplification, all else being equal, yadda yadda) someone undercuts market incumbents with a cheaper equivalent product, it has the effect of leaving consumers with more wealth, whether or not that's the producer's motivation.

It's nice that more people can afford a shiny thing now. But the iPhone has been pretty much market price for a long time now. I just don't see the touting that "poorer" people can afford a smart phone as anything other than marketing.

Henry Ford brought the price of a car down to a price that people can afford. The design to do so was to sell more cars. That's what creating a market for commoditized and mass marketed products does.

But the quote implies that there is some kind of huge shift of either money or power from a large company to the consumer (really poor consumers too!). It's not, it's a shift of a market from one paradigm (and a few companies) towards Google's paradigm where they make money off the back end.

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