Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Google is now on their third pivot, looking for added revenue sources.
First they tried to do ad-supported software and services. Most never got past the betaware state.
Then they tried mobile OSes and software and while Android has broad adoption, their choice of java on Linux created an IP minefield that sapped most of the profitability out of android and has encouraged forks. (MS is reported to make more money off android than google. And now they have their own Android fork.) Small wonder Google is working so heavily on ChromeOS.
Now, Google is turning to robotics. Self driving cars, etc. Not a bad gamble.
They're doing fine but for all their tinkering and tech investment, the bulk of their money is still from selling online ads.
Going from one successful product to a fully diversified portfolio is a rarity. Lotus eventually failed; Word Perfect, Ashton-Tate, Borland, DEC, Apollo, Sun... some lasted years, a few lasted decades, but all eventually faced a market shift and failed. Apple itself came to within inches of collapse and is still vulnerable to unforseen market shifts.
Facebook is another big company looking desperately for a tighter grip on their good fortune.
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It really depends on their current goals. If their goal is to aggregate data on their users, then they continue to succeed. Android's domination helps them there - even if vendors spin off their own edition, it's still got enough Google juice left over to feed back to the data aggregation.
Is Google's end-goal the data? Who knows. The question is where that data will go after it's aggregated, and I don't even know if Google knows what to do with it. They're sort of like a little kid getting everything he wanted for Christmas and then ending up asleep on the couch after five minutes of playtime.
Google's interesting because at one point they decided they wanted an ecosystem and they've been slowly moving in that direction, but the fragments from before are very scattered and users aren't all that interested in riding along with their changes. But it doesn't seem like they really want a locked-in app environment as much as Android suggests, so the end goal might be in motion or entirely fluid.