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Comment by prairiedock | Hacker News Reader

You haven't been following Apple's lawsuits against Samsung much, have you?

There's a bit of a difference between trying to kill the entire phone industry and suing obvious copycats who don't differentiate their products.

If Netscape has sued MS and won an injunction a lot of people would have cheered. Which brings up the old 'who's most like MS in mobile today?' question...

Microsoft made a netscape clone and gave away the product for free. Google made an iOS clone and gave away the product free.

Sure, but there's an important difference between "giving away one product to sell others" and "using a monopoly position in one market to eliminate competition in another", namely, that the latter is illegal but the former is not. Grey areas? Sure, lots, whence so may lawyers. But IE and IIS were clearly (to regulators, not me) not mere loss-leaders, but prongs of a coordinated response to a perceived threat to Microsoft's PC hegemony.

Besides, Android device manufacturers effectively "pay" Google for Android in search traffic (or reduced revenue share from search traffic).

Besides, Android device manufacturers effectively "pay" Google for Android in search traffic (or reduced revenue share from search traffic).

Actually google pays the android device manufacturers, not the other way around.

And google still manages to make money off of it. They aren't crowding out competitors at a loss in order to twist the screws later.

Are they making money off Android?

From what I've read on some blogs they never give numbers showing their profit or loss from Android, and looking at the situation from the outside I'd think it's more likely they're losing money on it at the moment.

Apparently it became profitable 2 years ago. http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/05/googles-eric-schmidt-says...

>Sure, but there's an important difference between "giving away one product to sell others" and "using a monopoly position in one market to eliminate competition in another"

.... you mean like using a near monopoly in search to finance paying manufacturers to use Android?

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