This involves a pretty dangerous assumption, which is that the current methods of monetizing phones are the only ones that matter -- and it sounds as though you're trying to make an even more unpleasant assumption, which is that wealthy people are the only people that matter.
This is Hacker News -- a site for people who set out to build things that don't exist yet. the ability to target 68% of the world's smartphone-using population seems pretty interesting to me. For example, consider an education platform, as Nicholas Negroponte attempted to with the OLPC project. Whether there's monetization or not, there might be an interesting opportunity there.
Open your mind a little. Not everything is about the profit-making horserace.
>>Open your mind a little. Not everything is about the profit-making horserace.
At the end of the day, it's money that makes the world go round. If you're making more profit than your competitors, you're getting ahead, because you have more money for R&D, more money for marketing, more money for buying promising start-ups, and more money for lawsuits.
I mean, the fact that Apple has a war chest of tens of billions of dollars in cash - more than the treasuries of many countries - paints a really bleak and hopeless future for Android.
This is wrong even in the context of economics. The whole history of the tech industry is a story of cheaper mass market solutions winning out over more expensive ones. Apple is the "IBM" in this chapter and Android is the "DEC" (or "Apple" I guess, though that's confusing). That's not a great place to be, even though it makes you more money in the short term.
While money doesn't make the world go round it does pay for producing your next set of products. So if you aren't making money on your current handsets, eventually you'll run out of capital to continue developing your next gen handsets.
"...paints a really bleak and hopeless future for Android."
Siri, remind enraged_camel to read this comment again in five years. Having a lot of money on hand doesn't mean you can easily spend all your competitors out of business.
"I mean, the fact that Apple has a war chest of tens of billions of dollars in cash - more than the treasuries of many countries - paints a really bleak and hopeless future for Android."
How does stupid bullshit like this actually make it to this website?
This is Hacker News -- a site for people who set out to build things that don't exist yet. the ability to target 68% of the world's smartphone-using population seems pretty interesting to me. For example, consider an education platform, as Nicholas Negroponte attempted to with the OLPC project. Whether there's monetization or not, there might be an interesting opportunity there.
Open your mind a little. Not everything is about the profit-making horserace.