Uh ... is this somehow different from their acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion? They later sold it to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, taking a $9.6 billion loss.
Not quite.
- They sold Motorola to Lenovo for 2.9 billion (as you correctly report). - They also sold the cable modem and set-top box business to Arris for 2.35 billion in 2012. - Motorola had 3 billion in cash.
So once you factor everything out (plus some tax assets apparently), it appears they lost not more than 3.5 billion on the deal. A nice article is here:
In return, they kept most of Motorola's patents in the end and defused a looming patent war between Motorola and other Android licensees.
So one view is that they paid about 3.5 billion for Motorola patents - which is less than Apple and Microsoft paid when they teamed up to buy Nortel patents for 4.5 billion.
But more importantly, Motorola was about to sue other Android manufacturers (Samsung, HTC). Google appeared to buy Motorola to end that threat because Android was not yet the dominant alternative to iOS. If Motorola would have sued everyone else, it could have disrupted the whole eco-system.
So I don't think Google regrets buying Motorola - it might have been a defensive move (getting more patents, prevent a patent war with other Android OEMs) but it wasn't hugely expensive in the end.
Right... Come on. Seriously. Give the actual worth of those patent instead of just peddling a spin.
More or less as valuable (IMO less) as the Nortel ones Apple bought for a couple of $Billion. That IP kinda failed as an offensive weapon, but was it wasted Apple money? If you just look at the surface like some posters here are tending to do with Google/Moto it would appear to be. The consortium led by Apple as the major investor spent $4.5B buying them and sold 'em off for $900M. Did Apple and company really lose over $3.5B in the deal? No they did not. But I would postulate that Google gained more from the control of Motorola IP than Apple gained from a far smaller Nortel portfolio.
Uh ... is this somehow different from their acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion? They later sold it to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, taking a $9.6 billion loss.
Hardly, and that applies to both the comparison and claim of losses from the Moto buy.
Google didn't buy HTC but only the engineering assets, and they didn't lose $9.6B in buying and then selling Motorola which included IP, product, plant and equipment.
This ignores what buying the engineering assets of HTC gets them after selling Motorola's engineering assets. It also ignores that Google was bleeding millions per qtr from Moto before they sold it and the patents weren't worth nearly as much as Moto claimed. It wasn't a positive outcome for Google.
$1B seems a lot for an acquihire of 2000 HTC engineers of varying worth.
Uh ... is this somehow different from their acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion? They later sold it to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, taking a $9.6 billion loss.
Hardly, and that applies to both the comparison and claim of losses from the Moto buy.
Google didn't buy HTC but only the engineering assets, and they didn't lose $9.6B in buying and then selling Motorola which included IP, product, plant and equipment.
This ignores what buying the engineering assets of HTC gets them after selling Motorola's engineering assets. It also ignores that Google was bleeding millions per qtr from Moto before they sold it and the patents weren't worth nearly as much as Moto claimed. It wasn't a positive outcome for Google.
$1B seems a lot for an acquihire of 2000 HTC engineers of varying worth.
How valuable are engineering teams? Apple spends millions every quarter to acqui-hire far smaller and less organized teams than that.
As for the intrinsic value realized from buying the Motorola patents none of us know, you included, what benefit they provided at the time of purchase nor what value they still have today. The amount on the books doesn't tell the whole story.
But it doesn't even matter anymore. Apple and Google were both placing high value and spending the big bucks on weaponizing IP at the time, whether for offensive or defensive purposes. Seems they both accomplished what they wanted since the Apple/Android patent wars have been settled in the years since, and the two companies have agreed to sheath the swords.
Uh ... is this somehow different from their acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion? They later sold it to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, taking a $9.6 billion loss.
Hardly, and that applies to both the comparison and claim of losses from the Moto buy.
Google didn't buy HTC but only the engineering assets, and they didn't lose $9.6B in buying and then selling Motorola which included IP, product, plant and equipment.
This ignores what buying the engineering assets of HTC gets them after selling Motorola's engineering assets. It also ignores that Google was bleeding millions per qtr from Moto before they sold it and the patents weren't worth nearly as much as Moto claimed. It wasn't a positive outcome for Google.
$1B seems a lot for an acquihire of 2000 HTC engineers of varying worth.
How valuable are engineering teams? Apple spends millions every quarter to acqui-hire smaller and less organized teams than that.
As for the intrinsic value realized from buying the Motorola patents none of us know, you included, what benefit they provided at the time of purchase nor what value they still have today. The amount on the books doesn't tell the whole story.
But it doesn't even matter anymore. Apple and Google were both placing high value and spending the big bucks on weaponizing IP at the time, whether for offensive or defensive purposes. Seems they both accomplished what they wanted since the Apple/Android patent wars have been settled in the years since, and the two companies have agreed to sheath the swords.
Google lost five years of development. What's the value of that?
Uh ... is this somehow different from their acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion? They later sold it to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, taking a $9.6 billion loss.
Hardly, and that applies to both the comparison and claim of losses from the Moto buy.
Google didn't buy HTC but only the engineering assets, and they didn't lose $9.6B in buying and then selling Motorola which included IP, product, plant and equipment.
This ignores what buying the engineering assets of HTC gets them after selling Motorola's engineering assets. It also ignores that Google was bleeding millions per qtr from Moto before they sold it and the patents weren't worth nearly as much as Moto claimed. It wasn't a positive outcome for Google.
$1B seems a lot for an acquihire of 2000 HTC engineers of varying worth.
How valuable are engineering teams? Apple spends millions every quarter to acqui-hire smaller and less organized teams than that.
As for the intrinsic value realized from buying the Motorola patents none of us know, you included, what benefit they provided at the time of purchase nor what value they still have today. The amount on the books doesn't tell the whole story.
But it doesn't even matter anymore. Apple and Google were both placing high value and spending the big bucks on weaponizing IP at the time, whether for offensive or defensive purposes. Seems they both accomplished what they wanted since the Apple/Android patent wars have been settled in the years since, and the two companies have agreed to sheath the swords.
Google lost five years of development. What's the value of that?
What development value is being claimed, and five years of developing what? They walked away with all the IP they needed, certain engineering talent and their projects in development, and now some of the top-level Motorola leadership that left with the sale is back on board with Google.
With the landscape now significantly changed 6 years later they've decided to approach smartphones from a slightly different angle, with Google directly running their own show rather than the hands-off stance that was demanded from owning Motorola... and they got to rid themselves of some of the bloat and baggage Moto was carrying. That was never going to work then, but things have matured greatly since 2012 and Google gets to start from a better place.
The only area Google seems to have a distinct advantage is machine learning. Their Pixel Visual Core offers 5x more performance than the A11 Bionic's Neural Engine (3 trillion OPS vs 600 billion OPS).
Nice to see Samsung make a 6-wide core. The A7 from 2013 says hello, took you long enough.
Also interesting the single core performance appears to be doubled, but multi is only 40% higher. So they have 4 monster cores, but they can’t run them all at full speed. There are obvious thermal issues at play preventing all 4 running full speed. So why bother with 4 cores? They should have used 2 large cores and 4 small cores like the A11 does.
As to Googles neural engine, you left a few things out. Apple only uses 2 cores to Googles 8, so not a direct comparison. And we don’t know what those “ops” are to say which is more powerful - it’s a pretty generic term. Finally, Apples neural cores are integrated into the A11. Google made a separate SoC. Which gives Apple a distinct advantage in moving data to and from their cores compared to having to work within the confines of an existing SoC (like a Snapdragon).
Uh ... is this somehow different from their acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion? They later sold it to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, taking a $9.6 billion loss.
Not quite.
- They sold Motorola to Lenovo for 2.9 billion (as you correctly report). - They also sold the cable modem and set-top box business to Arris for 2.35 billion in 2012. - Motorola had 3 billion in cash.
So once you factor everything out (plus some tax assets apparently), it appears they lost not more than 3.5 billion on the deal. A nice article is here:
In return, they kept most of Motorola's patents in the end and defused a looming patent war between Motorola and other Android licensees.
So one view is that they paid about 3.5 billion for Motorola patents - which is less than Apple and Microsoft paid when they teamed up to buy Nortel patents for 4.5 billion.
But more importantly, Motorola was about to sue other Android manufacturers (Samsung, HTC). Google appeared to buy Motorola to end that threat because Android was not yet the dominant alternative to iOS. If Motorola would have sued everyone else, it could have disrupted the whole eco-system.
So I don't think Google regrets buying Motorola - it might have been a defensive move (getting more patents, prevent a patent war with other Android OEMs) but it wasn't hugely expensive in the end.
Right... Come on. Seriously. Give the actual worth of those patent instead of just peddling a spin.
With hindsight bias all the smartphone patents weren't all they were thought to be. But in 2012 3.5 billion dollars didn't seem to be anl crazy amount of money to spend on Motorola parents - especially considering what was spent on Nortel parents by apple and Microsoft.
Finally, as I pointed out, Motorola's CEO had made noises about suing htc and Samsung over those patents. From google's point of view this was an entirely wasteful brooding civil war between Android oems - and it didn't matter if the patents were weak or strong, it was just a zero sum game from googles perspective that would have threatened Android. It might be hard to imagine but back in 2012 many people thought that Motorola had one of the strongest patent portfolios in the industry.
Is Google creating their own CPUs/GPUs and other mobile silicon now? I am not sure how you compete with Apple without having your own chip designers. For me the most exciting thing about new Apple mobile devices are the huge performance increases they have been getting year after year.
Uh ... is this somehow different from their acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion? They later sold it to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, taking a $9.6 billion loss.
But even with Google taking those losses they're again about to overtake Apple in overall value. At least Google and the other major tech companies keep trying to be competitors to Apple. Apple, on the other hand, isn't really doing anything to be competitive with those rival companies. Apple could have easily bought up DuckDuckGo as a rival search engine business. Big investor mindset is going with Apple because they feel that Apple is being run into the ground by never deviating from some dull set path. Apple is doing absolutely nothing bold to grow revenue even though their iPhone business is being undermined by more aggressive companies. Apple has the money to bury most competitors but chooses not to. No greedy big investor wants to own stock in a company like that.
Apple should have been able to run away from Alphabet in value a long time ago, but instead, Apple is running out of gas while the rest of the stock market soars in value. You can thank Mr. Conservative, Tim Cook for that.
they should be on a collision course with Samsung, i mean Samsung has been forking Googles Android more and more to build their own OS Tizen if i remember correctly, they all sell android devices if Google is getting into the hardware side then their attack should be Samsung in my opinion
If Samsung do fork Android for themselves (like Tizen), they would emulate Apple the best in being vertical with both software and hardware (even more hardware than Apple).
I would think from Google's perspective, Samsung with their own fork would be Google's nightmare.
From Samsung's perspective, Apple are their biggest competitor.
Google the king of flops, the one-pony ride company, the one with the search engine tha saw no improvement in 14 years, the one with a pile of flops like, wifi baloons, buzz, wave, circle, google plus, motorola, google monorail, google glass, all their laptops and phones, chromeos, google lively, google answers, google print ads, google radio ads, dodgeball, orkut, jaiku, google notebook, google drive, google video, google code, android@home, google viewer, google catalogs, google acelerator, iGoogle, google health, google fast flip, google offers, google wiki search, voice search, knoll, HTC, google bulletin, their speakers, their watch, and even the most giant flop of them all, Android, that as a business cannot give any relevant revenue to Google, that could keep the company going and gets 4 times less money to google compared to what iOS gives them.
I read now that Google is doing their own line of processors? hahahaha add that to the list.
The only success of google is adsense and that was not even their idea. Adsense/adwords was an idea by the lady that rented them the garage they started. Total humiliation.
Google, stop trying to be Apple and copy other companies and improve your web shits because people are starting to notice that they stink.
The only area Google seems to have a distinct advantage is machine learning. Their Pixel Visual Core offers 5x more performance than the A11 Bionic's Neural Engine (3 trillion OPS vs 600 billion OPS).
Nice to see Samsung make a 6-wide core. The A7 from 2013 says hello, took you long enough.
Also interesting the single core performance appears to be doubled, but multi is only 40% higher. So they have 4 monster cores, but they can’t run them all at full speed. There are obvious thermal issues at play preventing all 4 running full speed. So why bother with 4 cores? They should have used 2 large cores and 4 small cores like the A11 does.
As to Googles neural engine, you left a few things out. Apple only uses 2 cores to Googles 8, so not a direct comparison.
And we don’t know what those “ops” are to say which is more powerful - it’s a pretty generic term. Finally, Apples neural cores are integrated into the A11. Google made a separate SoC. Which gives Apple a distinct advantage in moving data to and from their cores compared to having to work within the confines of an existing SoC (like a Snapdragon).
Better late than never I suppose.
With a 2.9 GHz peak clock, clearly they can't. As for why 4 cores, because there are applications that can utilize multiple cores. Take for instance an application using Vulkan API, it will use 4+ cores effectively.
I don't know why you would have an issue comparing 2 cores vs Google's 8. That's just inherent of their design. Both operate on a mobile power budget, both can be directly compared.
For inference (which is what's being done on the device), the precision doesn't really matter. INT8 with quantization is enough. So OPS is sufficient for a comparison.
Being on the SoC doesn't hold much relevance here, the primary use case is for imaging purposes. The data is fed directly into the PVC, which has a single ARM Cortex A53 core, dedicated LPDDR4 RAM and PCIe.
The Snapdragon SoC used in the Pixel 2 also has a Hexagon 682 DSP for machine learning. The performance was never really highlighted, but Google is able to run their camera (HDR+, portrait mode, etc), offline music recognition and other features using only the Snapdragon SoC. Currently the PVC is only used to apply HDR+ to 3rd party camera applications. Although, as Google continues to open it up to developers, there will be more use cases.
Uh, no they can’t use all 4 cores at full speed. Did you not read your own link at Anand? Further, Android is a wasteland for software that can utilize modern processors with multiple cores, so those 4 cores are going to be wasted.
How can you claim the primary use case is for imaging (thereby diminishing Apple having cores integrated on their SoC die) then turn around and ckaim Google will “open it up to developers” presumably for other functionality? What makes you so sure Apple isn’t doing other things (or plans to) in the future?
Uh ... is this somehow different from their acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion? They later sold it to Lenovo for $2.9 billion, taking a $9.6 billion loss.
They are not buying the company, they're buying personnel.
Google the king of flops, the one-pony ride company, the one with the search engine tha saw no improvement in 14 years, the one with a pile of flops like, wifi baloons, buzz, wave, circle, google plus, motorola, google monorail, google glass, all their laptops and phones, chromeos, google lively, google answers, google print ads, google radio ads, dodgeball, orkut, jaiku, google notebook, google drive, google video, google code, android@home, google viewer, google catalogs, google acelerator, iGoogle, google health, google fast flip, google offers, google wiki search, voice search, knoll, HTC, google bulletin, their speakers, their watch, and even the most giant flop of them all, Android, that as a business cannot give any relevant revenue to Google, that could keep the company going and gets 4 times less money to google compared to what iOS gives them.
I read now that Google is doing their own line of processors? hahahaha add that to the list.
The only success of google is adsense and that was not even their idea. Adsense/adwords was an idea by the lady that rented them the garage they started. Total humiliation.
Google, stop trying to be Apple and copy other companies and improve your web shits because people are starting to notice that they stink.
One way they would be on a collision course with Apple is because they, like Apple, would control both hardware and the software and ecosystem around the phone, the entire platform. But I can see how they'll have to collide with Samsung first in order to finally collide with Apple (if they will in fact play the long game, like Osterloh says). I wish them well, and I like Osterloh. Hopefully they give Apple some serious competition.
But even with Google taking those losses they're again about to overtake Apple in overall value. At least Google and the other major tech companies keep trying to be competitors to Apple.
Apple (and I would say most tech companies) succeed when they do a good job, which requires focus. Buying a search company (when you’re not competing in search) is the opposite of focus. You’re buying culture mismatch and other headaches.
Pixar made tons of money, Apple made tons of money, why didn’t Steve merge them? Because it would have been a terrible idea. Yes Apple planned to go toward Media (the iTunes Store was made so iPod owners would have a good market to buy songs, and simple pricing of $0.99 per track - greedy record execs forced the change to $1.29 vs $0.69 to make sure all their popular tracks earned them 30% more and give you this fake feeling that you had any choice.)
This is why Apple puts it out on record, in almost every press release, that, Apple, from time to time, makes acquisitions of small tech companies that are part of their vertical focus. Small because then the good culture of the larger organization predominates. In their focus because, hey, if you make smartphones, then cameras, TouchID, FaceID, flash controllers - are integral to your product. There’s no drop down menu to change your flash controller like there is to change your search provider.
It is not not about money (why not invest in BitCoin too?) but rather about finding a sensible path, and taking the right kinds of risk. Risk where all the headache and worry grow your ability to execute.
Worrying how or whether FaceID will work —> good headache for Apple. Worrying whether government policy in Korea will change your BitCoin valuation —> distraction. Worrying about search engines —> distraction.
The only area Google seems to have a distinct advantage is machine learning. Their Pixel Visual Core offers 5x more performance than the A11 Bionic's Neural Engine (3 trillion OPS vs 600 billion OPS).
Nice to see Samsung make a 6-wide core. The A7 from 2013 says hello, took you long enough.
Also interesting the single core performance appears to be doubled, but multi is only 40% higher. So they have 4 monster cores, but they can’t run them all at full speed. There are obvious thermal issues at play preventing all 4 running full speed. So why bother with 4 cores? They should have used 2 large cores and 4 small cores like the A11 does.
As to Googles neural engine, you left a few things out. Apple only uses 2 cores to Googles 8, so not a direct comparison.
And we don’t know what those “ops” are to say which is more powerful - it’s a pretty generic term. Finally, Apples neural cores are integrated into the A11. Google made a separate SoC. Which gives Apple a distinct advantage in moving data to and from their cores compared to having to work within the confines of an existing SoC (like a Snapdragon).
Better late than never I suppose.
With a 2.9 GHz peak clock, clearly they can't. As for why 4 cores, because there are applications that can utilize multiple cores. Take for instance an application using Vulkan API, it will use 4+ cores effectively.
I don't know why you would have an issue comparing 2 cores vs Google's 8. That's just inherent of their design. Both operate on a mobile power budget, both can be directly compared.
For inference (which is what's being done on the device), the precision doesn't really matter. INT8 with quantization is enough. So OPS is sufficient for a comparison.
Being on the SoC doesn't hold much relevance here, the primary use case is for imaging purposes. The data is fed directly into the PVC, which has a single ARM Cortex A53 core, dedicated LPDDR4 RAM and PCIe.
The Snapdragon SoC used in the Pixel 2 also has a Hexagon 682 DSP for machine learning. The performance was never really highlighted, but Google is able to run their camera (HDR+, portrait mode, etc), offline music recognition and other features using only the Snapdragon SoC. Currently the PVC is only used to apply HDR+ to 3rd party camera applications. Although, as Google continues to open it up to developers, there will be more use cases.
Uh, no they can’t use all 4 cores at full speed. Did you not read your own link at Anand? Further, Android is a wasteland for software that can utilize modern processors with multiple cores, so those 4 cores are going to be wasted.
How can you claim the primary use case is for imaging (thereby diminishing Apple having cores integrated on their SoC die) then turn around and ckaim Google will “open it up to developers” presumably for other functionality? What makes you so sure Apple isn’t doing other things (or plans to) in the future?
Apple is really, really good at balanced design for its SoC's, and Samsung still has quite a ways to go to catch up with its Exynos SoC, if that's possible. Qualcomm''s Snapdragon lineup has lots of stuff bolted on to it to make it feature rich, but is it really optimized for any future Android OS version? If it were, why would Google want or need to follow Apple's path of creating their own silicon? I doubt that Google will be all that forthcoming with that roadmap beyond the next Android OS rev.
To me, this suggests a bit more balkanization of the Android OS device market. Google will, eventually, master the silicon it needs for the roadmap it has in place, and all others will have to take a best guess at that roadmap. Google will have obvious advantages over all others for efficiency of operation, and even features, with future versions of Android OS.
I'm guessing that Google sees Pixel volumes and margins like Apple, just farther off on the horizon.
But even with Google taking those losses they're again about to overtake Apple in overall value. At least Google and the other major tech companies keep trying to be competitors to Apple.
Apple (and I would say most tech companies) succeed when they do a good job, which requires focus. Buying a search company (when you’re not competing in search) is the opposite of focus. You’re buying culture mismatch and other headaches.
Pixar made tons of money, Apple made tons of money, why didn’t Steve merge them? Because it would have been a terrible idea. Yes Apple planned to go toward Media (the iTunes Store was made so iPod owners would have a good market to buy songs, and simple pricing of $0.99 per track - greedy record execs forced the change to $1.29 vs $0.69 to make sure all their popular tracks earned them 30% more and give you this fake feeling that you had any choice.)
This is why Apple puts it out on record, in almost every press release, that, Apple, from time to time, makes acquisitions of small tech companies that are part of their vertical focus. Small because then the good culture of the larger organization predominates. In their focus because, hey, if you make smartphones, then cameras, TouchID, FaceID, flash controllers - are integral to your product. There’s no drop down menu to change your flash controller like there is to change your search provider.
It is not not about money (why not invest in BitCoin too?) but rather about finding a sensible path, and taking the right kinds of risk. Risk where all the headache and worry grow your ability to execute.
Worrying how or whether FaceID will work —> good headache for Apple. Worrying whether government policy in Korea will change your BitCoin valuation —> distraction. Worrying about search engines —> distraction.
Comments
$1B seems a lot for an acquihire of 2000 HTC engineers of varying worth.
As for the intrinsic value realized from buying the Motorola patents none of us know, you included, what benefit they provided at the time of purchase nor what value they still have today. The amount on the books doesn't tell the whole story.
But it doesn't even matter anymore. Apple and Google were both placing high value and spending the big bucks on weaponizing IP at the time, whether for offensive or defensive purposes. Seems they both accomplished what they wanted since the Apple/Android patent wars have been settled in the years since, and the two companies have agreed to sheath the swords.
With the landscape now significantly changed 6 years later they've decided to approach smartphones from a slightly different angle, with Google directly running their own show rather than the hands-off stance that was demanded from owning Motorola... and they got to rid themselves of some of the bloat and baggage Moto was carrying. That was never going to work then, but things have matured greatly since 2012 and Google gets to start from a better place.
Nice to see Samsung make a 6-wide core. The A7 from 2013 says hello, took you long enough.
Also interesting the single core performance appears to be doubled, but multi is only 40% higher. So they have 4 monster cores, but they can’t run them all at full speed. There are obvious thermal issues at play preventing all 4 running full speed. So why bother with 4 cores? They should have used 2 large cores and 4 small cores like the A11 does.
As to Googles neural engine, you left a few things out. Apple only uses 2 cores to Googles 8, so not a direct comparison. And we don’t know what those “ops” are to say which is more powerful - it’s a pretty generic term. Finally, Apples neural cores are integrated into the A11. Google made a separate SoC. Which gives Apple a distinct advantage in moving data to and from their cores compared to having to work within the confines of an existing SoC (like a Snapdragon).
Finally, as I pointed out, Motorola's CEO had made noises about suing htc and Samsung over those patents. From google's point of view this was an entirely wasteful brooding civil war between Android oems - and it didn't matter if the patents were weak or strong, it was just a zero sum game from googles perspective that would have threatened Android. It might be hard to imagine but back in 2012 many people thought that Motorola had one of the strongest patent portfolios in the industry.
Apple should have been able to run away from Alphabet in value a long time ago, but instead, Apple is running out of gas while the rest of the stock market soars in value. You can thank Mr. Conservative, Tim Cook for that.
I would think from Google's perspective, Samsung with their own fork would be Google's nightmare.
From Samsung's perspective, Apple are their biggest competitor.
Edit: clarification.
I read now that Google is doing their own line of processors? hahahaha add that to the list.
The only success of google is adsense and that was not even their idea. Adsense/adwords was an idea by the lady that rented them the garage they started. Total humiliation.
Google, stop trying to be Apple and copy other companies and improve your web shits because people are starting to notice that they stink.
Google is the new Microsoft
Uh, no they can’t use all 4 cores at full speed. Did you not read your own link at Anand? Further, Android is a wasteland for software that can utilize modern processors with multiple cores, so those 4 cores are going to be wasted.
How can you claim the primary use case is for imaging (thereby diminishing Apple having cores integrated on their SoC die) then turn around and ckaim Google will “open it up to developers” presumably for other functionality? What makes you so sure Apple isn’t doing other things (or plans to) in the future?
Pixar made tons of money, Apple made tons of money, why didn’t Steve merge them? Because it would have been a terrible idea. Yes Apple planned to go toward Media (the iTunes Store was made so iPod owners would have a good market to buy songs, and simple pricing of $0.99 per track - greedy record execs forced the change to $1.29 vs $0.69 to make sure all their popular tracks earned them 30% more and give you this fake feeling that you had any choice.)
This is why Apple puts it out on record, in almost every press release, that, Apple, from time to time, makes acquisitions of small tech companies that are part of their vertical focus. Small because then the good culture of the larger organization predominates. In their focus because, hey, if you make smartphones, then cameras, TouchID, FaceID, flash controllers - are integral to your product. There’s no drop down menu to change your flash controller like there is to change your search provider.
It is not not about money (why not invest in BitCoin too?) but rather about finding a sensible path, and taking the right kinds of risk. Risk where all the headache and worry grow your ability to execute.
Worrying how or whether FaceID will work —> good headache for Apple. Worrying whether government policy in Korea will change your BitCoin valuation —> distraction. Worrying about search engines —> distraction.
To me, this suggests a bit more balkanization of the Android OS device market. Google will, eventually, master the silicon it needs for the roadmap it has in place, and all others will have to take a best guess at that roadmap. Google will have obvious advantages over all others for efficiency of operation, and even features, with future versions of Android OS.
I'm guessing that Google sees Pixel volumes and margins like Apple, just farther off on the horizon.
Well said.