This story seems to have made a bit of a splash in the news today, with people wondering how Google’s CEO, Larry Page, could say about Android that although important, it’s not critical to Google. Many conclusions have been drawn from this, but I believe the reason why he said it is a pretty obvious one.
Google is in a trial where Oracle is trying to prove that Android has taken a lot of money off the table from them, so they deserve billion dollar damages for that. The more Android is worth, the more that means that, if they win, Oracle will be entitled to a larger chunk of money. Do you see where I’m going with this now?
Ever since this whole fight with Oracle started, Google has barely even admitted that it makes any money at all with Android. They’ve simply said in the beginning that Android is open source software that they are giving away for free. Why would they say that? Well in part because that’s technically true. Google doesn’t make money directly from Android. They do it from ads, that happen to work on Android, as well as on iOS, Windows, Mac and so on. And they believe Oracle should not be entitled to that money at all.
But even just before the lawsuit, when they were supposed to settle, Google “offered” Oracle around $2.8 million per year (at the current rate of Android activations). Obviously Oracle thought that was a joke, considering they are asking for billions. But this goes to show that Google is trying to downplay the monetary value of Android as much as possible.
So whenever you see numbers like these from Google in the trial, don’t take it for granted to necessarily mean that Android is doing very poorly. Instead, it’s probably just Google trying once again to downplay the importance and value of Android, so even if Oracle wins (doubt it), it won’t cost them a lot of money in damages.