Nothing silly about that. Sounds like a good deal for everyone involved, especially for Google to be making money from Apple iOS sales.
Again, I think you need to think carefully about the "Android Revenue" figure.
As the iOS experience suggests, Google's mobile revenue is largely platform agnostic. Google gets paid for display ads regardless of whether someone searches using an iPhone, a Blackberry, or a Samsung (running Android). As long as Google is the search provider.
To that extent, I think you would have to admit that "revenue generated by Android users" isn't necessarily the same thing as "pure Android revenue" - for the simple reason that they'd still get a lot of it if Android
had never existed.
Now, you certainly can argue that Android's existence accelerated a) the rate at which smartphones were adopted and b) the amount of mobile search that got done. But it certainly isn't "one to one." Plus you'd also have to consider the fact that some "mobile search" is simply a replacement for "desktop search": You look for a restaurant on your phone in the car, rather than on your laptop before you leave the house. Google needs to be careful it isn't simply trading dollars.
In my opinion, Google's business plan for Android was fatally flawed from the start. As a profitable multi-billion advertising company, it could afford to toss a few hundred million into developing and giving away Android, hoping that they'd build enough marketshare to control the mobile Operating system business the way Microsoft did with PCs.
But there were some problems:
1) The more marketshare Google got - the more it drew patent lawsuits to the carriers and manufacturers using it. Google's "open source" gambit was a cute way of absolving themselves of any responsibility for patent infringement.
2) The "open source" idea worked - up to a point. But it also meant that there were dozens of different versions, working on different phones. PLUS, Android was cobbled (prematurely) into a Tablet operating system - with the result that early iPad competitors met with tepid (or worse) response.
As far as MacRumors are concerned, its fair to say opinion falls into two camps:
The "Android-believers" think that Android is succesful (in terms of marketshare) because it is superior to iOS. This, they feel, justifies their opinions regarding Flash, Hierarchical File Systems, "Openness", etc.
The "Apple-believers" think that Android achieved the marketshare it did, not because it was "better" than Apple, but rather because it was both "good enough"
and "not Apple." That while Apple was limited to a few carriers and models, selling at a premium price - there were enough people who simply wanted a smartphone on whatever their preferred carrier was, to allow Android to get the marketshare edge.
I believe Google's MMI purchase argues that the "Apple-believers" were right. That Android isn't working
for Google (at terms of revenue and profit). That the "open source" gambit made it a liability for a company with no patent portfolio to speak for. And that Google's lack of hardware capability, meant that they - and their Android partners - were at least one product cycle behind the iPhone.
In the big scheme of things, most consumers really couldn't care less about Flash running on Android, and not at all about hierarchical file systems.
