Amazon

[Grieve]

Apple's plan, I think, is a flimsier version of this. Amazon ultimately doesn't care who you buy your hardware from and in fact they'd probably have higher profits if you bought your tablet from someone else. They just want to sell you content and they don't care what you play it on.

This is both true and untrue. Both Amazon and Google make money from any tablet or cellphone, that's true. Google is the default search engine on iOS devices, and Googles make more mobile search money from Apple devices than ones running Android. Likewise you can buy stuff from Amazon from any device, and there are Kindle apps on iPhones/iPads and Android devices.

However...they both very much prefer you to use their devices over the competition. Kindle Fire basically locks you into it's ecosystem - everything is routed through the Amazon storefront, the Amazon Android store, Amazon Prime, and so on. That's why Google is very unhappy with Amazon, and primarily why they created the Nexus 7. If you buy apps via the Amazon app store, Google gets nothing. If your purchases are all automatically routed to the Amazon store, Google isn't getting search income. So Amazon is more a threat to Google than Apple.

Google similarly wants you to use Android devices rather than iOS devices, even though they currently get more money from Apple users, because they can likewise push you towards Google services (i.e. Google search), and the Google Play appstore, where they get their 30% cut. Also Apple is slowly slicing out Google services from the iPhone/iPad one by one - YouTube and Google maps are about to be dropped as default included apps. I don't think it will be long before Google is no longer the default search engine either.

I would say the company in most trouble here is Google - they are being squeezed by Apple on one side and Amazon on the other. Both of those have a better ecosystem than Google, and importantly, both can sell hardware directly, which Google has a very limited ability to do (despite the purchase of Motorola).

I think Apple and Amazon are the likely winners, and Google is going to get more and more marginalized. As Maul said, lawsuits and the fact that Google is going to give preferential treatment to Motorola means that other manufactures will jump to Microsoft. Even though Amazon is also a fork of Android, I think Android may have peaked in terms of market share.