I disagree. Nobody at Google would have a job if it wasn't for Adsense/Adwords, which hasn't changed since the Goto.com days. It's a fancy click counter script paying everyone's salary. Search = content to sell clicks. You could fire 99% of everyone at Google and they wouldn't lose one penny of profit.

So the App store infrastructure, support, etc just built itself automatically? The entire eco-system would not have been possible without them making it.

I've been an App developer for 4 years now and have no qualms with apple taking the 'passive' 30%

Look, the fact that these two companies happen to be be geographically located in resource-rich land is in no way a merit. Apple pretty much did a survey and struck the iPhone, which has been guzzling up ever since. Google bought some land from Herman J. Android and it turned out to have a large natural deposit of everything that has been coming up ever sense in the form of its mobile offering.

But make no mistake: if you had put a stick in the ground you would have seen the same result, provided you were as geologically fortunate as these two lucky suckers.

I suppose Apple devotes a lot of manpower and is very "active" in excluding all developers and applications outside of its walled garden.

Google is much different in that you have the option to publish on alternate app markets, or self-publish your own apps, of which Google gets a cut of $0. This lack of control over their own app marketplace is probably the cause of Google's flagging stock price and Android's failure to effectively compete with iOS in the mobile market.

>"the cause of Google's flagging stock price and Android's failure to effectively compete with iOS in the mobile market."

Was your comment sarcasm, or just terribly misinformed?

"Flagging" stock price? You mean the one that's hovering around all-time highs? Android's "failure to compete" with iOS for the mobile market? With 80%+ of global market share?