Long before the iPhone arrived, Google’s search engine had become the centrepiece of a cloud empire which included Gmail and YouTube, and which would later include Google Drive, Google Maps and a host of other online services. Keen to exploit its already dominant cloud capital, Google followed a different strategy to Apple’s. Instead of manufacturing a handset in competition with the iPhone, it developed Android – an operating system that could be installed for free on the smartphone of any manufacturer, including Sony, Blackberry and Nokia, who chose to use it. The idea was that if enough of
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