Highlight from Read Write Own
Google pursued a classic tech strategy known as "commoditize your complement." Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Stack Overflow and Trello, coined the phrase in 2002, drawing on the work of economists such as Carl Shapiro and Google's Hal Varian. Google commoditized a large share of the mobile operating system market, thus ensuring its search engine—its real moneymaker—could flourish, unimpeded, on a new computing platform. The move lessened Google's platform risk in the industry-wide shift from PCs to mobile and improved its negotiating power, removing threats to its search profits.