With Microsoft planning on heavily investing in Barnes & Noble to help create a subsidiary for its e-books and college books business, Google may not be entirely happy. Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch is a device that mainly runs on Google’s Android platform (albeit heavily skinned).
Microsoft is trying to find their way back into the e-book business. This move by Microsoft may affect Google quite negatively. It may impact Android’s success as it may fail to become a successful market for the growth and development of tablets. In the case of smartphones, Google has managed to push Apple’s iOS to the second positon in the market. By giving away the operating system for free, Google has managed to attract more consumers to their services and earn revenue through ads.
However, at the same time, the very fact that Android is open source and simple for developers to modify may now be working against Google. Companies are now open to creating their own editions of Android, known as ‘forks’. This can be seen in the instance of Amazon’s Kindle Fire which is the best Android based tablet, yet very little traffic is directed towards Google on account of Amazon’s media services that help the company make up revenue lost on account of its self-subsidized prices.
Barnes & Noble’s Nook was introduced in 2009 and it managed to reduce Amazon’s market share to 60-65% from 90% in the e-book business. Barnes and Noble created their own ‘fork’. The two companies have managed to modify Android to such an extent that the version of the OS on their tablets is unrecognizable as Android, and gives Google almost nothing in terms of revenue and visibility.
Microsoft, Google’s rival, is willing to replace every Android run mobile device with Windows Phone run devices. They have gone ahead and taken to threatening or suing hardware dealers who use Android, excluding Amazon. While several of them have paid royalties, Barnes and Noble has conveniently agreed to sell a stake in its e-books business to Microsoft. Microsoft and Amazon may have created a ‘fork’ following Android’s success with tablets, but neither of them leads to Google. Microsoft may be pitching for an e-reader based on Windows while it continues to gather revenue from devices that run on Android.
