Exactly this. Google products always feel like they weren’t designed by someone who carefully thought about and empathizes with the end user (thinking of Google cloud specifically).

Off course the end game of every employee at the company is to make money. But people are hired for specific focused areas for a reason. If you expect your engineers to do your VPs and director's jobs too, you should fire all you senior leadership. The employees aren't doing cool stuff because they don't care about the directions from above. If the product directions are wrong, it is a fault of senior leadership more than anyone else.

Android has made sure google will survive. If iOS and windows phone were the two dominant platforms, they could change the default search engine at any time, and give Google a huge shock. In the post PC world, without Android google would have been at the mercy of the mobile vendors. A lot of search income should be direct result of android, which the above figure doesn't acknowledge.

And in the end, Google still has to pay Apple a reported $9 billion a year to be the default search engine so they don’t lose the statistically more affluent iOS users.

What does it say about Android that even Eric Schmidt refused to use one years after it was introduced?

https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-eric-schmidt-why-i-love-my...

Can you imagine the CEO of Apple telling reporters how much he loves his Android phone?

The problem is that the VPs were former engineers.

Yes google is still paying Apple for iOS. But if iOS was 50% of the market and other 50% dominated by let's say microsoft, Google would be paying Apple a lot more, along with possibly not being the default search engine on Windows Phone. The difference is gigantic. Paying Apple 9B$ should be fine for Google as long as they are making proportional money from iOS.

> $22 billion in profit

I mean, "only" is relative here.

Total after 8 years? Apple makes a larger profit than that on iPhones in one or two quarters. That’s probably less profitable than the Apple Watch will be after its first 7 years.

The majority of Android's value to Google is indirect - by having people view their ads through their platforms and the developer mindshare that comes with the platform. It's exactly the same strategy as Chrome. It is very telling how difficult it must be for developers on the Play Store though.

Back then they didn't sell hardware which is where most iPhone revenue comes from.