Google’s advertising model prevented it from optimizing Android against the iPhone.

Evidence

As for Google, it was left fighting with one hand tied behind its back; for it was now being haunted by the choice it had made at that fork in the road in 2000, when it went the way of the attention merchant. Android is, of course, a competitor of the iPhone, and thus Google’s prime channel for accessing the minds of mobile users, a must-win cohort. But being wedded to an advertising model, Google was in no position to follow Apple and make Android the best experience it possibly could be. For the company was in a bind of its own making, stuck serving two masters, trying to enact the attention merchant’s eternal balancing act between advertisers and users, at a time when the latter were losing patience. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1129

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the 1998 Page and Brin warning that advertising corrupts product quality, and the broader trade-off central to the whole book — advertiser vs user loyalty as the attention merchant’s recurring bind. — connects to: Google faced the same advertising trap it had exploited to beat Yahoo. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1130

Broader Connections

• Google faced the same advertising trap it had exploited to beat Yahoo. #expands (0.88) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1130