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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

Google opens an Uber competitor. Uber opens a Google (research) competitor.

It will be interesting to see which one can commodize the other. I feel that what Google has built (self-driving cars) is harder to replicate, but Google doesn't have the killer instinct that Uber does.

If Android is any guide, Google would rather spread their innovation around to partners rather than to use it to build a killer first party product. I imagine Google will license their future self driving-car stack to the existing car manufacturers, Uber, et al.

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Say what you wish about the fractured Android ecosystem, but it managed to get >84% of the market-share vs <12% for iOS, despite having arrived later and being (at least in its earlier incarnations, before Android 4.x) a much less polished product. Samsung alone has more users than Apple does. Spreading their innovation around to partners was a killer move from Google the same as selling their software to IBM clones was a killer move for Microsoft.

Note: Not arguing that Apple's strategy was unsuccessful in the least, but Google wouldn't have been able to beat Apple at their own game (integrated hardware-software luxury-branded product) at the time of the iPhone/Android release.

It's because of the cost, nothing else. Everyone I know would switch to iPhone in a heartbeat if they had the Rs. 60k you need in India to buy one. My Android phone, on the other hand, cost me Rs. 13k.

Android thrived because shelling out a month's salary on phones is a losing proposition in third world countries (which have the majority of phone uses)

This is just not true. Android manufacturers sell huge numbers of high end phones that cost the same amount as iPhones. I have owned both, and found the Android to be a much better user experience. iPhone has the worst keyboard I've ever used, the screen on the 5 was way too small, and I just find the whole UI to be really clunky and badly designed for the way I use devices (eg. The lack of a back button and inconsistent way apps try to deal with this limitation)

Sure, plenty of people like iPhones and plenty of people would swap, but I know a lot of people who really don't like iOS and are far happier with a high end android

> This is just not true. Android manufacturers sell huge numbers of high end phones that cost the same amount as iPhones.

But not in India, a third world country, as OP makes the point. Majority of Android budget range here is ₹5000 ($90) to ₹15000 (~$300). Where as an iPhone costs ₹53,500.

My point is that there are probably plenty of Indians who, if they had 53,000 to spend on a phone, would choose a high end Android. Some iPhone fans try to make the argument that "everyone who could afford it would buy an iPhone", and that is just not true as evidenced by the large number of high end Androids which are sold. Some people just don't like iOS.

Apple's profits from the iPhone alone in the last quarter exceeded the total profits of Google and Microsoft combined.

At first i thought, you were comparing against only the mobile divisions of Google and Microsoft. But after some search, I found that their profit is really massive!

Now i really want to understand the forces in play, that help the iphone reap such gigantic profits :)

This is both true and completely irrelevant.

How so? This is about Google's relative competitiveness. You seem to blithely dismiss Apple's success with iOS relative to Android, claiming that high end Android phones sell in comparable quantities. This is patently contradicted by the facts. If the goal of an enterprise is to make profits, Apple is crushing Google in the mobile device business.

Google & Apple aren't remotely in the same business WRT mobile. Apple is hugely successful, no question, with their success riding largely on four factors: 1) industrial design, 2) idiot-proof OS, 3) zero hardware diversity, 4) 3rd party developer support. Google is hugely successful, too, but they have no mission statement that says they are intending to squeeze every last penny from the mobile market. I mean seriously, the last number I heard was that there were close to 1500 people working on Chrome-related stuff. The fact is that Google makes "small" (hundreds of millions to a few billion) amounts on a broad variety of things, and underwrites the spectrum of R&D/engineering via their advertising juggernaut. Whether they do well at this or not is another question, but they are not competing with Apple on hardly any fronts.

The discussion is not about whether Apple is a profitable company, its about whether "everyone who could afford it would buy an iPhone". There is plenty of evidence that many people prefer Android regardless of price. Whether Apple's business model is good or bad is a completely different discussion.

Price is just as important in the first world countries. Not everyone wants to spend almost $1k USD on a phone, which is something you might drop and break. When there are Android phones on offer with equal or better specifications and a lower price, most people will pick that one.

It's not because of the cost. I switched to Android because I wanted a large phone and the Galaxy Note was available YEARS before the iPhone 6.

Then there is the annoying fact that as soon as a new iPhone comes out, the old ones get slow/ start crashing Every single iPhone my family has had (sample size of fifteen, starting from the original phone) has had this issue.

Edit: the other big issue was the iPhone's lack of multitasking. For the longest time it wasn't possible to do something as trivial playing Pandora while reading HN.

Well, in the US, a bit over a year ago I chose the Galaxy Note 3 over the iPhone 5S because it was bigger, faster, higher-resolution, had much more RAM, had a much larger battery (which was replaceable), etc. The iPhone 6 didn't exist at the time and I stand by my choice to go with an Android phone given the options at the time.

I don't think so. Having an iPhone is considered a status symbol. If they started selling it for say Rs.20K, it will lose its allure.

Android phones are cheaper than iPhones. That's all it is.

Part of the reason why they are cheaper is that they are made by many manufacturers with experience in large scale electronics production who compete strongly on price for most of their product lines. If Google had decided to launch Android by themselves with the electronics production capabilities they had at the time, it would have been priced like Google Glass. If they had partnered with a single manufacturer, it would still have been vastly more expensive than what they did.

Not that there aren't other important factors for Android's success, as even relatively expensive Android phones are quite competitive with iPhones in market-share. But even if you assume it is just price, that is an argument in favor of the multi-vendor strategy, not against.

>it would have been priced like Google Glass.

Glass was purposely priced out of the range of consumers. It was meant as an experimental platform only.

Sure, I know I am being hyperbolic.

Still, it would have been priced higher than relative high end Android phones, have worse specs than mid-level phones and be perhaps better only in consistency and software-hardware integration (did I just accidentally describe the Nexus line?). It would not have beaten Apple at its own game and without a larger market-share and more friendly developer terms, it would not have had enough apps to achieve critical mass (and now I seem to be describing the Windows Phone...).

I am glad it is. Millions of people are able to get the benefits of smartphones because of that. If Google can bring auto-driving cars to the whole world with lower cost then I will again gladly welcome it. However, that's still a decade away really.

So? It doesn't matter how simple it was; it worked.

And the larger sized screens really made a difference to the market.

It's amazing to see Samsung in so much trouble now that Apple has released the iPhone 6/6+. They have lost a staggering amount of profit in only a few months.

Check your dates. Samsung started losing much of its profit before the iPhone 6 came out. It lost 66 percent of its profit year over year in the summer quarter (Apple's weakest quarter, in fact).

Samsung may have lost some market share and profits when the iPohne 6 was launched, but it really started bleeding when it stopped any pretense at innovation, and it just kept iterating on the ugly design of Galaxy S3 and the bloatmess of Touchwizz. Galaxy S5 was considered a failure. Because of that Samsung intends to "rebuilt everything from scratch" with Galaxy S6. It's not because of the iPhone 6.

I've checked the dates. Samsung recently posted their biggest loss in operating profit since 2009. Which unsurprisingly coincided with record sales and market share growth by Apple.

I didn't say they didn't lose MORE when Apple launched the iPhone 6. I said Samsung was already on a FAST DECLINE in profits since EARLY THIS YEAR.

84% market share is a loss if you don't make any money on your product.

> 84% market share is a loss if you don't make any money on your product.

Its a win if it is preventing a competitor from getting the kind of dominance in a market that is key to delivery of a product on which you do make money (like, in Google's case, mobile platforms are to online advertising) that they could use to extract rents that would cut into those profits.

Chrome and Android don't need to make money directly to be successful, they just need to be popular enough that other browser or mobile OS vendors can't use their position to cut off Google's advertising revenues.

Well you are still potentially stopping your competitors from making money on their product.

That's certainly true, although I don't think Apple is struggling in the revenue department these days.

To be fair, Android has contributed to Google's core business by massively expanding the reach of their search ads...or so the story goes.

iOS has a 42.5% market share[1], where are you getting your info from?

[1]https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

IDC: Android at 84% (http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp)

Strategy Analytics : Android at 85% (http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/07/31/android-reached-reco...)

That's their share of mobile web browsing. It measures usage, while the other numbers here are measuring share of unit sales.

There's always been a big disparity between the market share and web usage share of Android vs. iOS: http://blog.cloudfour.com/explaining-the-ios-and-android-mob...

Google (probably) knows the answer to this question. How many people completely miss the WiFi connection prompt?

You could mix in data from browsers (how many people browse near a wifi point that they have connected to with their browser, but don't connect with their wifi? how many people browse in the evening/morning but not connected to wifi?)

There's probably a wealth of demographic data they could correlate through gmail content and/or chrome browsing trends to correlate user income level, although I don't know if Google has privacy controls in place that makes sharing this data between divisions possible.

Smartphones are the first computing experience for a lot of people. My mom, 64, had never used any sort of computing device before I got her an Android smartphone. She doesn't even know what a browser is. The only thing she knows is how to use WhatsApp and order things off a shopping app I installed for her. To her, that's the "internet". And she is perfectly happy with that.

Lol, 84% in what countries?

Looking at our web stats across our clients, android isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to iOS.

Having a large market share in third world countries who won't buy your app isn't much of a win.

>> ask Whatsapp. :)

If Whatsapp lost, sign me up for losing.

Whatsapp is really a special case, though. They cornered a market that's relatively unique. Third-world countries don't need another messaging app.

And from my experience here in Cambodia, everyone is using Facebook anyway. So it isn't a clear black and white "third world countries only use whatsapp" either.

Also, there is a severe desire of everyone to buy an iPhone -- so they just lag behind a lot. You can buy a pre-jailbroken iPhone 4G for around $100 here.

> Having a large market share in third world countries who won't buy your app isn't much of a win

Pretty sure the large market share in third world countries also doesn't care about your win either. They just have Android phones. Not sure if it is Google's win, users' win or OEM's that make the hardware's win. Kind of a mix perhaps.

>>Google opens an Uber competitor. Uber opens a Google (research) competitor.

Yep, but I feel like one significantly outclasses the other as a research facility. Will be interesting to see what happens.

>>but Google doesn't have the killer instinct that Uber does.

Why do you say that about the most visited site in the world? Genuine question.

I'm an Android developer, so that experience colors my perception. But compare Apple and Google in mobile. Everything Apple comes up with goes into making their product better, and they will fight with every tool they have to make the iPhone the better smart phone.

Every time Google comes up with a high quality product (Google Now, Inbox, Maps), they do everything they can to ship it on iOS as well as Android. If it wasn't for Apple, Google Now & Maps would be just as good on iOS as on Android. Google doesn't use their cloud service advantages as a weapon to make Android better than iOS. They just want their technology in front of everyone, no matter what they use.

I see self driving cars as a similar market. Google wants self driving cars to happen. There are lots of good reasons, but from their perspective it is both a play for even more data, and it increases the amount of time we have to use Google products. I can look at ads even longer if I don't have to drive on my commute. Thus for them doesn't it make sense to license/give away all of that tech to everybody? It doesn't matter who manufacturers the car, so long as it uses Google's car software.

Thus, plenty of companies will make self driving cars using Google's software. Thus Uber will have plenty of access to self driving cars.

If Google was more focused on killing Uber, they would hoard the self driving software for their 1st party initiative. I imagine if Uber invents self driving tech, no one else is getting it. They are far more interested in the core product of driving people from A to B.

It's a bit of 'commodize your compliments' and the two companies respective business model. Google operates a scorched earth campaign of making everything around ad supported internet as cheap or free as possible. Uber and Apple are building businesses around charging money for the product they make directly.

> Everything Apple comes up with goes into making their product better

Apple maps? Your statement used to be true, but not anymore.

You misunderstand the motivation behind self-driving cars. It's not ads and not data. Google has enough of that.

It's just that a huge bunch of money goes to whoever who controls those.

> They just want their technology in front of everyone, no matter what they use.

I don't know about that - the Windows Phone people are pretty bitter about Google's current stance (no maps, no youtube, no hangouts).

Google is the most visited site in the world because it offers a product that is significantly better than its competitors.

Google is yet to display the aggressive expand-at-all-costs philosophy of Uber. Despite all those privacy concerns, I still believe that many of the guys at Google believe that "Don't be Evil" mantra. It also helps that the guys who've been in charge so far - Page, Brin and Schmidt - are, at heart, nerds who just love technology. Page and Brin are mostly accidental businessmen - they were doing their PhDs, not trying to build the next Microsoft.

Kalanick and the guys running Uber seem to be more about business than technology. Nothing wrong with that, of course. This gives them the killer 'profit at all costs' instinct OP describes.

Plus, Google does about 10 things (maps, Android, search, Devices, Plus, video, cloud services, productivity software, Chrome, Chrome OS, autonomous cars, etc.). Uber does only one thing. That helps it to focus - a key ingredient of 'killer instinct'

Based on the past, in 2 years Google will have shut down their Uber-esque project.

Meanwhile, Uber will be spending money researching their core business and will keep pressing on with shipping, consumer-focused products.

How exactly do you feel you can make those predictions about Uber?

I mean, other than the ridesharing thing, what other consumer focused products have Uber shipped? You can't really make a good prediction based on one thing, right?

Another issue some people here have overlooked: Google is a public company. It is responsible to its shareholders who seldom share the founders' long-term vision. 1 year of Google losing cash on an ambitious car project and investors will start grumbling. Another year of that and you will have some 'activist investor' asking for ending the damn thing and going back to making profits.

Uber is a private company and a growing one at that. It is expected to lose money. It can go all in without anyone but its private investors questioning it - private investors who want it to do whatever it can for a $100B IPO

Google is public , but they offered unique stocks where control stays with the founders. So if they decide to invest in competing with UBER ,they will.

I feel that what Google has built (self-driving cars) is harder to replicate, but Google doesn't have the killer instinct that Uber does.

You need more than "killer instinct" to match a decade of research in autonomous vehicles.

What you call "killer instinct" I would call delusional or "dumb money".

I probably agree on your viewpoint, but it's not like Google really has an advantage of "a decade of research" over everyone else.

They do have a serious advantage, but a the vast majority of benefits of this decade of research is not developed and kept by Google in-house. Key parts of it are either included in non-core components (sensor hardware, commodity electronics) that are used also in other applications (such as computer vision applications in manufacturing industry robotics) and Uber can simply buy that from other companies; or in publicly available academic research and data resources.

In terms of actual competitive advantage in self-driving cars, I'd say that Google has the following things - (a) a vast store of high-precision mapping and laser scan data that nobody else has; (b) a 1 (2?) year gap in pure research between what they have and what has been openly published by someone; and (c) a bunch of engineering expertise and experimentation experience that Uber doesn't have but some others do -e.g. many major car manufacturers. An impressive gap, but one that can be overcome in acouple years if you're serious about it.

many major car manufacturers

Who?

All demos that I've seen from Mercedes Benz, BMW, Toyota, Volvo, etc. were generations behind google. The self-parking car seemed to be their most impressive feat so far.

Meanwhile Google Car is commuting in live city traffic, without anyone touching the wheel.

http://www.cnet.com/news/a-ride-in-volvos-autonomous-car-how...

Google just has better advertising because that is Google's core business.

Car manufacturers are aiming for consumer budget, i.e. are planing to sell these technologies to customers in foreseeable future, while google is building self driving car no matter the costs and is reaching space program-like budget. So there's also that to consider.

Car manufacturers are aiming wrong because of their old business model. Google is aiming at a taxi service, where expensive car costs are less critical, but being first to market(by quite a few years), reliable, having a large network and a good brand mean much more.

Here's a Mercedes prototype driving in live traffic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5kJ_8JAp-w

I would put that on the same league as Google's.

I wouldn't be surprised to see the big car manufacturers put a self-driving car on the market before Google. For instance, the car in the video looks much more like an actual product than the Google car, with it's spinning radar on top.

Google's spent a lot of money in a lot of different areas, but I haven't been terribly impressed by their output. Google glasses seems to be a good example about how they can excite people before release and then stumble when the product actually comes out (though this is an issue with a lot of tech companies).

Self-driving cars is one of many research projects for google, and it's far from their core competency. If they have money to spend and are very focused on this. I wouldn't count Uber out.

Its a race between UBER building/acquiring self-driving capabilities vs. Google spreading to all the markets.

Sadly, as much legislative power as Google may have, I think we may be in an age where its easier to create the technology of self-driving cars then to get through the political/regulatory red-tape that UBER has been fighting through for years. That's probably an exaggeration, but given the how many other companies are dabbling in the self-driving space now, it may be less innovative than a few years back. On the other hand, I don't thing political/regulatory barriers are any easier to get through.

At least we have two big players trying to solve a big problem, so hopefully we'll benefit in the end.

I'm not sure that I want to ride in a car built by a company with a killer instinct. ;)

Google doesn't spread innovation around to partners [0]... the terms of OHA, and the terms of Play Store are strongly in favour of Google and effects any competitor [1] that forks Android without Google's blessing.

The Play Store terms range from absurd to downright ridiculous.

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/22/google-open-when-convenient... [1] http://marketingland.com/acer-incident-revives-conspiracy-th...

More like, my ex-cofounder created Facebook, so I rage-opened a terminal and typed in `mkdir facebook_killer && cd facebook_killer && git init`

> I imagine Google will license their future self driving-car stack to the existing car manufacturers, Uber, et al.

Tesla perhaps?

Pretty much only Tesla. Almost every other car manufacturer either has cars in testing or they will have access to the technology through technology sharing.

I think a self-driving Tesla would be awesome. If anyone could make that work well and sell it, it'd be them.

Even spreading it around will work in Google's favor in this case. In this case, it seems Google's goal would be gathering transportation (and obtain tracking information). Thus they could undercut Uber prices.

"Uber opens a Google (research) competitor" with money it got from Google ($258 million)

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