Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy (Fast Forward Your Product Career: The Two Books Required to Land Any PM Job)

Alternatively, apps and websites can charge advertisers whenever someone actually clicks an ad, which is called Cost-Per-Click, or CPC.

To summarize, why did Google make Android free to phone manufacturers? While it might not directly make Google any money, this move helps Android get more users, more app purchases, and more searches on Android — all of which helps Google haul in profits.

This is how Tor works: it wraps your communication in several layers of encryption and bounces it around many intermediate “relay” computers, each of which only knows the previous and next computers in the chain.[620]

Amazon uses data about its Prime subscribers in an area to decide what items to store in warehouses in the area, a move designed to optimize the speed of deliveries.

Prime is a powerful loyalty program that gets customers to spend more and more money on the platform.

Prime members do a greater proportion of their shopping on Amazon.

One study found that a self-driving fleet would cost just one-tenth as much to operate as a normal taxi fleet — something that would definitely help Uber move toward profitability.[922]

So, in summary, why did Microsoft buy LinkedIn? There are many factors, but the underlying theme is that it helped Microsoft maintain its much-needed chokehold on the enterprise space and keep the valuable business and data of LinkedIn away from its opponents.

By buying WhatsApp, Facebook made a smart defensive play. WhatsApp was strong in the exact countries where Facebook was weak, so the purchase shored up Facebook’s international presence.[983]

And since collaborative filtering gets better with more users, Spotify (which already has tons of users) can continue furthering its lead. The second reason is that personalized recommendations make users more likely to stick with the service.[40] The more you use Spotify, the more the algorithms know about your tastes, and hence the better they ca