@Daggerchild,
"AFAIK, most Chinese handsets are Androids that aren't using Google's services, and instead there are multiple equivalent alternative ecosystems of significant size. I don't think Google sees a penny from any of it."
Indeed they don't. Arguably this could be seen as a monumental miss by Google - there's over a billion Chinese people few of whom are contributing to Google's profits. Yet it is Google who have to put the money into Android to make it shiny, etc.
Normally such a miss would be of significant concern to a company's shareholders, and that in turn would be a bad (potentially really bad) thing for the company's board. However in Google's case they make such large profits anyway that this miss is somewhat masked, and there are certain off-putting difficulties in operating Google-like services in a Western way inside China.
Google are destined to be broken up at some point. It's the goal of any Internet services company to be the only Internet service provider (i.e. they've outgrown everyone else). Given how well Google have done this it's only a matter of time until some anti-trust thing gets going in the US.
Google kinda need things like Bing, Yahoo, etc to succeed in a significant way otherwise they'll find it hard to argue that they're not a monopoly (though many would argue that they already are...). Charging money and imposing nasty conditions in return for a binary blob without which an Android phone is virtually unmarketable is very monopolistic indeed. AFAIK, in comparison Microsoft give Windows Mobile to the manufacturers (the few who are left) for free.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
