Posted on Thursday, October 07 2010 @ 3:14 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
NewsWeek has published a piece on the invasion of Google's Android operating system in the mobile market, you can read it
over here. In an interview, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Android could eventually become a $10 billion business, which is about half of the search giant's current annual revenue.
Google also counts the very nature of Android as a strength. The company does not make money from Android directly. It gives the software away to hardware partners. Google reckons that Android gets more people onto the Internet, where Google can show them ads. Google CEO Eric Schmidt says Android-based phones already generate enough new advertising revenue to cover the cost of the software’s development. Google could make money in other ways too, for example, by opening an online store to sell music and videos to Android users. Schmidt envisions a day when there are 1 billion Android phones in the world and notes that if Google could get just $10 from each user per year, it would be a $10 billion business. That’s real money even for Google, whose revenues this year will be $21 billion.
