Image by holisticmonkey via Flickr

Google's "castle" has long been thought of as search.  But the company does so much more, and in fact its mobile platform may be the real common thread.

In a post last week entitled The Freight Train That Is Android, Benchmark Capital General Partner Bill Gurly explains the unprecedented success of Android as a defense, or "moat" around Google's (GOOG) castle.

One of Warren Buffet's most famous quotes is that, "In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable 'moats'." An "economic castle" is a great business, and the "unbreachable moat" is the strategy or market dynamic that heightens the barriers-to-entry and makes it difficult or ideally impossible to compete with, or gain access to, the economic castle. . .

For Google, the economic castle is clearly the search business, augmented by its amazing AdWords monetization framework.

The post is spot on in almost every sense.  But I have one issue... More