>>>Android taking a tumble would is not the point: it being nearly license free is not...
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>Perhaps the lesson is that as markets change, revenue models must change too. Google has no trouble making a profit despite practically giving away useful software and services from which others are accustomed to extracting juicy revenues.

Google's (and most of the other web players') revenue comes from advertising. Most of the time, advertising is a parasite on just about everything. What you get for free from Google et al, you pay through the price of everything else, which contains the advertising cost. Quality of most of the products is getting lower and lower - the production costs are driven as low as they can push it - but there's never too much of a problem to fork the cash for advertising, because hey, competition did so already and so must we if we mean to survive. It's like seeding a war between neighbors, where the only one that profits is the weapons seller. Everybody else pays.