Google exec: Android was “best deal ever”
Buying Android Inc., the wireless-software startup founded by Andy Rubin, was Google's “best deal ever,” said David Lawee, vice president of corporate development at the search giant. — Lawee made the remark at a panel at the 16th annual …
Context & Ripple Effects
Lawee's claim caps a year in which Android moved from experiment to centerpiece: Andy Rubin laid out the platform's trajectory for the New York Times' Bits blog back in April, six months before his company's corporate-development chief called its acquisition the search giant's best ever. The bet only worked because of groundwork laid earlier — including Google's successful push for open-access rules on new wireless spectrum, which kept carrier gatekeeping from strangling a third mobile ecosystem.
The remark matters because it is an internal valuation, made at a VentureBeat panel, of a deal whose returns were still being counted in 2010: Android was shipping on a widening range of handsets while Google monetized none of it directly.
First-order effects
- David Lawee's framing signals Google's corporate-development arm sees platform acquisitions, not just products, as the deal template — raising expectations for how aggressively Google will buy in mobile going forward.
- Andy Rubin's team gets explicit top-cover at the executive level, strengthening Android's claim on Google engineering resources against competing internal bets like Google TV, which industry sources speculated was already forcing a reorganization after negative reception.
Second-order effects
- Handset makers building on the free Android stack can price against Apple's integrated hardware-software model without paying an OS license, pressuring rivals to either join the ecosystem or differentiate on hardware alone.
- Carriers, having lost the walled-garden leverage the spectrum fight eroded, shift their negotiating position from controlling the OS to competing on network terms for Android device exclusives.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile operating systems consolidate into a small number of free, ad-subsidized platforms where the acquirer profits from search and services rather than software sales — making early platform acquisitions, not R&D, the decisive competitive move.
- A two-ecosystem structure raises the stakes for regulators and partners alike: whoever controls the default distribution layer on hundreds of millions of devices holds pricing power over apps, search placement, and eventually every service riding on the phone.
The trend: Mobile computing is consolidating around freely licensed, ad-funded platform ecosystems acquired rather than built, with Google's Android purchase as the template deal.