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RE: Interesting times
By Aikouka on 11/12/2010 2:13:49 PM , Rating: 2
For all the numerous initiatives Google has launched (and sometimes abandoned) over the last decade it has still not found a source of revenue that comes even remotely close to matching it's income from desktop search/advertising.

I'm certainly not affiliated with Google in any way, which makes this only my opinion, but I'd say that Google realizes that there's more to success than simply revenue. While shareholders would certainly disagree with that ( ;) ), there is certainly something to be said about the other popular "metric of success" that is tossed around often: market share.

Google and Facebook both seem to realize the importance of market share and when introducing some changes, you need to ensure your product has ample saturation to avoid losing users. An example could be when Facebook finally put advertisements on their site.

As another example, Google uses Android's Free/Open Source state to give it a huge boost in adoption rate among manufacturers. Chances are they could sell it and still be successful, but you could argue that it wouldn't be as successful... especially now with Microsoft's mobile OS now available (prior to that, there really wasn't a viable option for competing with Apple's iPhone).

Mostly just my own musings :).

