David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…I don’t know that you could sell great employees on that, right? If you’re the best VR developer, screw that, I’m going to Valve. Here’s a potential counterfactual, one we’ve covered on this show: Android. So Google is a horizontal company, Google Search and Google Services, Gmail, Maps, whatnot were great on iOS as on Android obviously. I think it’s pretty clear at this point like we talked about on that episode the mobile wars are over and that everybody within Google is aligned on making those services work great across all platforms, and yet they still have Android. But now here’s what’s key about Android I think to my mind. Google doesn’t make Android phones. I mean, that's changing a little bit. But like the whole strategy was get the software out there, get the operating system, let other people, let other ecosystem partners build a great hardware and get it in the hands of people, and that use Android as a way to make sure that we are going to be able to continue to deliver these great Google services to everybody across all platforms. (A) Do you think that that’s a viable strategy? (B) Can Facebook do that? Totally a viable strategy. Very interesting. The main takeaway for me is Android itself doesn’t make money. It prevents Google from having to give money to other people like Apple.…

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