by eric » Tue Oct 08, 2013 12:08 pm
Again, you don't have to sell luxury products, but you do have to develop and maintain a brand, and brand recognition.
When you have companies gaming benchmarking, and then having your OS run like shit, or having sub-par companies associated with your products, that hurts your brand.
Google's primary business is advertising. Guess what? People don't like being advertised to. I don't want advertisements in my Gmail app. At some point, they're going to lose customers to competitors because of this. Excluding search/advertising, Google actually hasn't come out with anything that directly generates them revenue through sales. This is a set-up for disaster if they start to lose market share or if people look for ad-free alternatives.
Also, they aren't really "killing" in market share, since direct market-market comparisons aren't accurate representations of the business as a whole. More useful metrics would be online use, customer satisfaction, operating system adoption, and company-company comparisons. And since they give away Android OS, they are relying on advertising through their applications (gmail/youtube) to generate revenue, which of course annoys customers. Right now people aren't too fed up with it, but if they continue to increase advertising, they will alienate customers.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
