Distribute and Be Damned 57
they even seemed to operate as one company.
67
However, when Apple
began secret development of the iPhone in 2004, Google’s equally secretive purchase of Android led to an all-out war for control of the mobile
market place in the subsequent decade.
In terms of sheer volume, Android appears to have easily won the battle: by the first quarter of 2018, devices powered by Google’s operating
system – effectively given away for free (hence the EU fine) – accounted
for 85.9 per cent of all sales, with iOS being a distant 14.1 per cent.
68
By this time, all other potential competitors – Microsoft, Symbian, or
Blackberry’s RIM operating system – had disappeared. Yet, this absolute
control in terms of volume of sales is completely reversed when it comes
to profits: in some respects, the competition is a false one – aside from
its Pixel devices, Google is not in the mobile market to make a profit,
but the device manufacturers it leases its operating system to are, and in
terms of making money, all of them apart from Samsung are struggling.
In the same quarter where Android accounted for nearly 90 per cent of
all devices sold, Apple – even with a slight dip in sales – managed to take
86 per cent of all smartphone profits. This massive disparity between
Android and iOS obscures a fundamental similarity between the two
companies: that essentially, for all the talk of innovation, they have become behemoths dependent on one service or product. For Apple, it is
the iPhone, accounting for more than 60 per cent of its revenue by the
beginning of 2018 (a slight decline from nearly 70 per cent in 2015);
for Google, it is advertising. Without advertising, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, are respectable, medium-sized tech companies;
from 2001 to 2010, Google’s revenue was almost entirely dependent on
web searches. Google does not need to make money on sales of its Android operating system: what it does need is to ensure that its services
are fully available on every device. As people moved from desktop and
laptop computers to mobile, so it needed to ensure that they would still
use Maps, Gmail, Docs, and, of course, Google Search to provide a constant stream of information. Thus far, we have strayed from the subject
of Google’s impact on journalism, but understanding the organisation’s
dominance of advertising is crucial to understanding the commercial environment in which much journalism thrives or fails. In a decade, Google had supplanted the original innovators of web search such as Yahoo!,
Excite, and Altavista, but the rise of Apple’s mobile operating system
threatened, in turn, to supplant Google as the search engine of choice.
By exercising market share dominance via Android, Google looks set to
maintain its primacy for the foreseeable future, and today search is one
of the primary means by which we encounter the news.
Yet, it is not the only way to find the news: while this chapter concentrates more on Google as a distribution network, the second route to
finding information is via the serendipity of social media. While some
platforms such as Twitter have a crucial role to play in this regard, the
they even seemed to operate as one company.
67
However, when Apple
began secret development of the iPhone in 2004, Google’s equally secretive purchase of Android led to an all-out war for control of the mobile
market place in the subsequent decade.
In terms of sheer volume, Android appears to have easily won the battle: by the first quarter of 2018, devices powered by Google’s operating
system – effectively given away for free (hence the EU fine) – accounted
for 85.9 per cent of all sales, with iOS being a distant 14.1 per cent.
68
By this time, all other potential competitors – Microsoft, Symbian, or
Blackberry’s RIM operating system – had disappeared. Yet, this absolute
control in terms of volume of sales is completely reversed when it comes
to profits: in some respects, the competition is a false one – aside from
its Pixel devices, Google is not in the mobile market to make a profit,
but the device manufacturers it leases its operating system to are, and in
terms of making money, all of them apart from Samsung are struggling.
In the same quarter where Android accounted for nearly 90 per cent of
all devices sold, Apple – even with a slight dip in sales – managed to take
86 per cent of all smartphone profits. This massive disparity between
Android and iOS obscures a fundamental similarity between the two
companies: that essentially, for all the talk of innovation, they have become behemoths dependent on one service or product. For Apple, it is
the iPhone, accounting for more than 60 per cent of its revenue by the
beginning of 2018 (a slight decline from nearly 70 per cent in 2015);
for Google, it is advertising. Without advertising, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, are respectable, medium-sized tech companies;
from 2001 to 2010, Google’s revenue was almost entirely dependent on
web searches. Google does not need to make money on sales of its Android operating system: what it does need is to ensure that its services
are fully available on every device. As people moved from desktop and
laptop computers to mobile, so it needed to ensure that they would still
use Maps, Gmail, Docs, and, of course, Google Search to provide a constant stream of information. Thus far, we have strayed from the subject
of Google’s impact on journalism, but understanding the organisation’s
dominance of advertising is crucial to understanding the commercial environment in which much journalism thrives or fails. In a decade, Google had supplanted the original innovators of web search such as Yahoo!,
Excite, and Altavista, but the rise of Apple’s mobile operating system
threatened, in turn, to supplant Google as the search engine of choice.
By exercising market share dominance via Android, Google looks set to
maintain its primacy for the foreseeable future, and today search is one
of the primary means by which we encounter the news.
Yet, it is not the only way to find the news: while this chapter concentrates more on Google as a distribution network, the second route to
finding information is via the serendipity of social media. While some
platforms such as Twitter have a crucial role to play in this regard, the