This is the biggest announcement this year IMO. Google is finally playing to its strength here (really Amazon showed the way). They make money on services and so they want to cut the hardware margins as much as they can. This hits Apple exactly where it matters since Apple only thinks about making money on hardware. This is a significant change in strategy and could be the most important one this year. Will be interesting to see if Apple sees this and how it counters.
> Will be interesting to see if Apple sees this and
> how it counters.
How dumb do you think people at Apple are?
And I don't see how it hits Apple — apple has been operating in low margin markets for ages, except that they have high margins and products good enough for people to pay the price asked.
The dumb move would be to join the race to the bottom.
And frankly, I am so sick and tired of the world where everything is paid by advertising that I am gladly paying premium.
OTOH I think advertisers start to think what are they really paying for.
Call me stupid. But I think Apple probably 'sees' what Google is doing.
And I really don't think they could care less. Apple has never been about competing on market share. They care about profit. And I personally this strategy by Google may be great in the short term it has the potentially to really harm the platform in the long term. Because what it has done is set a price point that transfers margins from the OEMs to Google. And with some of the OEMs already struggling that can't be good.
