He didn't "forget" them; the profitability of component manufacturers has no more to do with the fact that most Android licensee Phone manufacturers aren't turning much profit off the business than the profitability of shovel salesmen has to do with the fact that most gold prospectors never found anything worth selling.
Yes, it does. "Arms merchants" like Qualcomm, TI and NVIDIA are more than just "shovel salesmen". Among other things, they're the ones who do the first ports of Android to their chipsets. I don't remember where I read this, but they compete just as much as the phone manufacturers do to make it into "Nexus / Google Experience" devices.
One of the big reasons profitability matters is because it drives future investment. To the extent that component manufacturers are making money porting Android to their components and selling the combination, they're going to keep investing, even if their downstream customers are locked in a brutal price war.
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He didn't "forget" them; the profitability of component manufacturers has no more to do with the fact that most Android licensee Phone manufacturers aren't turning much profit off the business than the profitability of shovel salesmen has to do with the fact that most gold prospectors never found anything worth selling.
Yes, it does. "Arms merchants" like Qualcomm, TI and NVIDIA are more than just "shovel salesmen". Among other things, they're the ones who do the first ports of Android to their chipsets. I don't remember where I read this, but they compete just as much as the phone manufacturers do to make it into "Nexus / Google Experience" devices.
One of the big reasons profitability matters is because it drives future investment. To the extent that component manufacturers are making money porting Android to their components and selling the combination, they're going to keep investing, even if their downstream customers are locked in a brutal price war.