Hacker News Reader

Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

>It’s a heads we win, tails you lose strategy. That’s the brilliance... Amazon wins so long as you consume media content from Amazon, no matter if you play it on a Kindle Fire or an iPad. Apple only wins if you buy an iPad.

It's amusing that Gruber can see the brilliance when amazon does it, but not when Google does it. This is exactly google's strategy with android, except that it doesn't involve users buying content. Google makes money when you use the internet. They win whether you use an iPad or a Nexus or a Kindle, Apple only wins if you buy an iPad.

View on HN

Apple hasn't turned on Amazon yet. As soon as they do Gruber will be the first to tell us how awful Amazon's strategy is.

I think they've taken shots across the bow. Charging 30% for IAP right as they released iBooks was pretty squarely aimed at Amazon.

Apple stopped the Kindle app from linking to the amazon bookstore. That's as close to war as you can get.

Not really. No apps are allowed to link to places where purchases can be made for that app. The purchases need to happen within the app itself, at which point Apple gets a cut. If the app decides not to allow in-app purchases and cut Apple in, it may not link to other places where purchases can be made.

This may be, in the end, the worst mistake that Apple is doing with their platform. What shape would for instance web shops, or the SaaS market, be in, if the only way to run one was to give 30% of your revenue to Netscape.

Netscape could still be alive this way, but web would be way smaller.

>Netscape could still be alive this way, but web would be way smaller.

Now, think your argument again.

If you're a SaaS app provider, you keep 100% of any revenue you generate through your own website. So if a customer buys a subscription from your website and then downloads your free app from iTunes, you keep 100% of that revenue that you sourced.

If a customer downloads your free app from iTunes and then upgrades to your Subscription offering using an In App Purchase, then you have to share 30%. What Apple is asking for is that if the subscription is generated from inside of the app, you give a 30% revenue share on those subscriptions. That's why they disable links from your app to your website... because those revenue opportunities originate from Apple.

I am not a huge fan of this approach, but it's definitely more defensible than requiring a SaaS provider to give 30% of all subscription revenue to Apple. Apple does generate and give app developers a steady source of traffic/app customers, and it's not unreasonable for them to get some consideration for it. That said (and this is totally subjective), 30% does feel high to me.

Amazon is, like Apple, a "sell people stuff at a price they're willing to pay" company, versus a "free but we will auction slivers of your soul" company. Apple makes most of its money up front, Amazon makes most of its money... um no one is quite sure how or if Amazon makes money. Google "gives" away goods and services and makes money selling ads ... like an old fashioned TV network. Not exactly the same thing at all.

Oh, and how much net profit has Android yielded Google?

> Oh, and how much net profit has Android yielded Google?

Probably a whole lot. When my sister, who would otherwise be in front of a computer at most half an hour a day, can get an android smartphone for 150 euros and idly browse the Web all day, Google makes a shitload of money they wouldn't have if all these people were on cheap nokias.

Don't iPhone users make just as many (probably more) Google searches as Android users? Or do you think that without Android, nobody would have put out cheap smartphones by now?

Probably more? As far as I know, there are more Android devices in the market than iPhones.

Android users are not using their devices the same as iOS users:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/real-time-research-ios-domi...

No doubt, yet iPhone still generates more mobile web traffic than Android.

But if you replaced all the android devices with iphones, Apple would have HUGE leverage over Google.

Apple charges Google for being the default search engine.

(Not implying you specifically, nor is it necessarily a bad thing...)

Interesting framing and perception - I've never read anyone say that "Mozilla charges Google for being the default Firefox search engine", it's always been "Google pays Firefox to be the default Firefox search engine".

Same result, really, but it's interesting how much of a change it implies, passive vs active, etc.

Sure, true enough. Though it's not like creating Android was free.

It's quite possible there wouldn't be cheap smartphones without Android. At least, not ones with a decent browser. Meego imploded on its own, Palm took webOS down with it as a realistic option, and MS would probably never let the word "cheap" attach itself to Windows Mobile. What's left? Openmoko, maybe? And, just as importantly, if you assume the cheap smartphone makers wouldn't gang up and make their own platform, who else might have pushed a new, free, mobile OS other than Google? Funnily enough, the only other company I can think of who might have had a go at it is Amazon. Today I could see Facebook having a go, but where were they 7 years ago?

Then again, markets are funny things. In a world without Android, I can't imagine the expensive iOS ecosystem being the only game in town. Something might have filled the sucking void at the cheap end of the market, but what?

I realise I've effectively written Symbian off here. It's funny, it took me a good 5 minutes to even remember it existed. I suppose we could hypothesise that in a world without Android, the Nokia of 2009-2010 might have seen the light, but I think that's extremely unlikely.

Licensing Windows Mobile is what? $30 a unit? Less?

So without Android isn't it safe to assume HTC would still be pumping out Windows phones, perhaps at $389 retail rather than $349?

Yeah, but at sub-$100? Probably not.

Yes but Android cost Google billions more, and occupied the limited attention of key people for years. The evidence is that most android buyers do very little web surfing.

What evidence is that then? StatCounter currently show Android to be at least as big as iOS for web hits. http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201108-20120...

Divide that by the number of owners of each platform. There's your answer. Well, there's part of your answer. Chances are that Android owners are bimodal - some (like me) do a lot of surfing, others very little.

If Android users are bi-modal then simply factoring in the number of Android handset sales is not an accurate comparison either.

It sounds like what we really want is a histogram of web usage vs number of users :)

Actually the move to mobile is hurting Google. People tend not to click on ads while searching from mobile devices as much as they do on desktops. And since people are moving to mobile, Google's ad revenue growth is getting affected.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/15/mobile-paradox/

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/12/mobile-facebook-and-google-...

And remember Google doesn't keep that 30 percent cut from the Play store -- it goes to carriers, I believe.

Citation needed.

I only found this, about limited ad revenue sharing: http://paidcontent.org/2010/03/26/419-androids-secret-sauce-...

Via Wikipedia:

http://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/bin/a...

"the remaining 30% goes to the distribution partner and operating fees."

When I read that a couple weeks ago, I assumed distribution partners meant carriers, though I guess I don't really know what it means. Also, operating fees probably means Google, so I stand corrected.

Oh, and how much net profit has Android yielded Google?

Android has cost billions but what if Apple and Microsoft shared the mobile market and replaced the default SE with Bing or Yahoo? That was Google's worry and that's why they spent billions for years. That huge expense was essentially hidden by filling web search pages with ads in commercial niches to the point of making them unusable. When earnings grow by double digit questions are few

Google saw that in mobile you only get a seat at the table by owning a platform demanded by customers or by being a carrier. Otherwise, you're just a feature on someone else's product–-something that can easily be swept away. You're thinking along the right lines. Google's decision to develop Android should be evaluated not by whether it has made profit to date, but by the alternatives facing Google at the time.

> no one is quite sure how or if Amazon makes money

I thought it was pretty clear that they're an e-commerce powerhouse.

Probably meant profit, not money. Makes a little more sense that way.

free but we will auction slivers of your soul

You must not think much of your soul if you think what they do is auctioning it off.

Amazon makes money from selling digital and physical media content as well as physical goods. Google makes money primarily from search-based advertising — YouTube which is digital content is around the order of 1B revenue whereas total revenue is in the range of 30B.

Amazon makes money whenever you buy their content. Google not so much.

When you have a strong platform player that have decisive power over how they locate information — in the case of Apple, (1) control over the default search engine in Mobile Safari, (2) control over what web browsers are approved for their App store (3) has their own maps app backed by their own services and partners, which doesn't include Google (4) demonstrated capability and intent to build alternate ways to access information such as Siri (5) demonstrated animosity — I'd say Google doesn't feel like they win if you buy an iPad.

So correction, it should be "Google makes money when you use their services".

The difference is with Amazon you're the customer, and the device and content are the products. With android, _you_ are the product and the advertisers are the customers. This distinction means that Apple/Amazon's interests are more aligned with consumers than Google's.

"This distinction means that Apple/Amazon's interests are more aligned with consumers than Google's."

Not necessarily. It simply means they have more incentive tying you down to their 'product' and stifle any competition. Google on the other hand couldn't care less about what device you use as long as you use their services.

so instead of tying you down to the device, they tie you down to their services. In my eyes, thats not too different.

At least with a physical device, you may be able to subvert any ill intentions.

They do? Then they do a crappy job at it, since when I moved out of Gmail and GReader and when I get something on Google Docs, I could export my data in standard formats.

You should really tell them they're screwing their tying down plans with their Data Liberation initiative, the Google Takeout and all those APIs.

The difference is with Amazon you're the customer, and the device and content are the products.

Funny, my Kindle has ads. I believe you mean IF you pay the $15 extra, and for all I know is that $15 allows you to turn off ads. As far as I know, it doesn't preclude Amazon from selling your information and choices to third parties. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

You still paid for the device generating revenue directly to Amazon. The ads are just supplementing a discount on the product. Google is not making money off of the Android devices they don't sell, although it is changing as they start building and selling their own hardware.

No, you are not the product sigh. Google has to keep users satisfied as much as they can, and they do. E.g., AFAIK, they downrank ads which point to sites which people leave too early again, even if they would generate them more revenue.

Ad clicks is the product, and not users' data. If you setup an ads campaign, you will see that the adwords experience is not nearly as polished as other Google products - and why should they care, businesses just HAVE to use adwords to gain traction. If anything, Google treats its ordinary users as clients, and forces its advertising monopoly on advertisers.

Ad clicks is the product, and not users' data.

Google's using data they aggregate about me to pick and choose which ads I should see, ideally optimizing for ones that I'll click on. Those clicks are sold to advertisers.

Google's selling our clicks to advertisers. We are the product they're selling.

Exactly. It's not a bad thing, it's a pretty fundamental basis of the Internet and the reason we get so much for free. At the end of the day it is still a win for consumers. I'm glad it works that way, since I'd rather view ads then pay a monthly subscription to Google (or would I? At least most people would).

With android, _you_ are the product and the advertisers are the customers

uhm..what? There's no ads in android itself, and I almost never look at ads on my phone..

Googles not making any revenue off you directly, yet they're paying engineers to work on it. They're making money somewhere - it's off of the ads you you see while you likely use google's services.

Please note that I don't think this is a bad thing, and I love and use Google's products myself very happily. But there is a difference between Google who is collecting revenue from advertisers, and Amazon/Apple who are making their money primarily from consumers.

I, and millions of others, don't think Google when I think content. I, do, however, think Amazon. This is the difference between Google and Amazon.

The key quote from Asymco's analysis of Android's revenue:

>It might be hard to see the Android section of the chart so I expanded it below at 400% the original:

http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/15/android-revenues-in-perspec...

Isn't that a comparison of hardware revenues vs Google Android ad revenues? And isn't that exactly Google's play—keep the market from being dominated by a single hardware company that could cut them out from those revenues? ('Course, Amazon has forked it to do basically the same thing, in some regards, so while it might work as an anti-Apple-hegemony move, the openness may have been too much, even from a business persepective.)

"Android" revenue as a whole to be compared against Apple's hardware revenues would need to include Samsung, HTC, etc. And then I'm sure Apple's margins would still be higher due to their excellent supply chain, but it's not like they aren't spending any money making all that hardware.

Remember when Apple was making 75% with only 8% market share?

http://www.asymco.com/2012/02/03/first-apples-rank-in-mobile...

Linking to asymco is getting cliche ...

Remember how Microsoft makes >75% of the money and "wins" in the web server market with IIS? Or the majority of profits in the server OS market with Windows Server? Didn't think so, because there's no blog roll pushing that on the blogosphere and then given traction on HN.

Asymco does pretty partisan analysis which has previously been debunked earlier. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2471026

Wasn't he and Gruber making a lot of predictions and analysis that Android would never overtake the iPhone in sales? When that did happen,iPhone on Verizon was surely going to kill Android's ascendancy. When that failed to stop Android, they moved to the next metric that favors Apple, profit share.

It's like, before he writes some articles, he thinks.. okay here are some new numbers, how do I make Apple look good and Android/others look bad with these numbers? The only problem is that some people on HN give the Apple fan blogs too much traction on HN. Hell, Paul Thurrott's http://winsupersite.com is even hellbanned on HN from being submitted for the crime of being a Microsoft watcher site for which the punishment here is flagging to death.

Googles strategy with android is to serve ads but they do not have a model to get that to work.

Until they do that Android is not a win.

Google doesn't have a strategy to serve ads on android? sure they do, it's called a web browser. Google has the largest ad network on the internet, and just about every time you view a webpage google gets a cut of it. It doesn't matter whether you use an android device or an iOS device or a windows computer or a potato, google makes money.

if google can encourage people to use the internet more by selling smartphones, they win. The point of android is not to cannibalize iOS market share, it's to eliminate the dumbphone. They don't want anybody to ever be without internet.

That's not a strategy for mobile.

If what you said where true more of their revenue would come from mobile. It doesn't, look it up.

Android is winning for Google in a massive way once you understand their goal. Google's Android and even Chrome strategies are that _no one_ should win at the OS/platform level. They never want another Windows, or Mac, or IE, or anything that prevents them from leveraging the open web because it's fronted with proprietary code that can block them.

The best way to win at that game is to either force the market to adopt the system they can manage ("with Google" approved Android phones and the market) or make the web the only worthwhile source of truth among a hodge-podge of OSes that try to bolt on proprietary components. Even the major commercial forks of Android have not yet proved to derail this from succeeding.

  > that try to bolt on proprietary components

I will always prefer something that has no ads bolted on.

Just want to point out that, literally, this implies you prefer Windows (no ads by default) to Ubuntu (ad for Launchpad in /etc/motd).

I don't see an ad:

  $ cat /etc/motd
  Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-30-generic x86_64)

  * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/

Not sure if you're being facetious, but recent versions of Ubuntu have included by default an advertisement for Landscape (not Launchpad, mea culpa):

http://www.ralree.com/2011/11/25/removing-advertising-from-u...

If this is no longer the case that's great. :)

/etc/motd is a script that generates the motd on any somewhat vrecent version of ubuntu, it is not just that static file. On ubuntu server, one of the things it includes is an ad for landscape. you won't see it on Ubuntu desktop.

Again it's only a win if they figure out a way to monetize on it and they haven't yet. I doubt they will, but lets see.

That's not true.

Android gives Google a large number of devices where Google is the default search engine and (assuming we're talking about the "official version") always will be.

That's a big win - default search in the browser is something they and others pay a lot for and for (official) Android devices Google aren't paying that. The reason that they pay that money to others (including Apple) is that that's a way of serving and selling ads to the mobile platform.

Talking about amusements - another one is that Android activations are still "activations" for Gruber, long after Jobs and co doubted if Google is truthful with their number. Gruber definitely gets his % numbers wrong though - half percent instead of 5% :)

>This is exactly google's strategy with android, except that it doesn't involve users buying content. Google makes money when you use the internet. They win whether you use an iPad or a Nexus or a Kindle, Apple only wins if you buy an iPad.

Well, it's not the same at all.

For one, Google wins a minuscule amount of money if you use the internet. Amazon probably makes more off selling 1 (ONE) Kindle book than Google makes from you using their search engine all year around on their tablet.

Second, noone buys those other tablets (apart from iPad/Kindle). The numbers are 1/10 the iPad numbers and less.

Third, Google doesn't even win when people use Kindle Fire, despite it being Android. IIRC, Amazon switched the search engine to Bing.

>Google makes money when you use the internet. They win whether you use an iPad or a Nexus or a Kindle, Apple only wins if you buy an iPad.

And how does that work for Google vs Apple revenue/profits so far?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com