• Cnet, Friday, May 22, 2009 12 PM

"Among all the companies fighting to grab a piece of the brightest star in computing -- the smartphone -- Google seems the least interested in taking the spoils," says Cnet's Tom Krazit. That would be because Google doesn't generate any money from Android, the mobile operating system it introduced to the world in 2007. According to Andy Rubin, Google's mobile director of platforms, the idea is simply to get more people using the Internet from their mobile phones. And Google thinks Android is the best means for achieving that end.

"Google's business model is deep into advertising, and so for Google this is purely a scale of the business, we just want to reach more people, and hopefully they'll use Google and we'll get the upside of the advertising revenue," Rubin explains. "By the way, we're confident enough in our advertising business and our ability to help people find information that we don't somehow demand they use Google. If somebody wants to use Android to build a Yahoo phone, great."

Rubin adds that there's a natural connection between open source and the advertising business model: "Open source is basically a distribution strategy, it's completely eliminating the barrier to entry for adoption," he says. As such, Google's first inclination is to look at Android as a scale business. How many phone makers can it get to use Android? Meanwhile, it doesn't plan to make money from these deals; Google actually hopes to encourage mobile Internet use to drive Web searches and ads.

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