Google Phone Could Drive Apple Into Allegiance With Microsoft

rsmiller510 writes "A BusinessWeek report suggests that the Nexus One release marks the latest volley in an escalating war between Google and Apple, one that could force Apple into working more closely with Microsoft. 'When companies start to imitate one another, it's usually either an extreme case of flattery—or war. In the case of Google and Apple, it's both. Separated by a mere 10 miles in Silicon Valley, the two have been on famously good terms for almost a decade. ... Now the companies have entered a new, more adversarial phase. With Nexus One, Google, which had been content to power multiple phonemakers' devices with Android, enters the hardware game, becoming a direct threat to the iPhone. With its Quattro purchase, Apple aims to create completely new kinds of mobile ads, say three sources familiar with Apple's thinking. The goal isn't so much to compete with Google in search as to make search on mobile phones obsolete. ... Some analysts believe the Apple-Google battle is likely to get much rougher in the months ahead. Ovum's Yarmis thinks Apple may soon decide to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices, primarily to cut Google off from mobile data that could be used to improve its advertising and Android technology. Jobs might cut a deal with—gasp!—Microsoft to make Bing Apple's engine of choice, or even launch its own search engine, Yarmis says."

Comments

Re:I have a very hard time buying this

[BrokenHalo]

Jobs has become a vile, nasty little piece of work, but in this case he's not far wrong. Microsoft has produced a lot of stupendously crappy output.

thank goodness it is real competition and not

[Locutus]

thank goodness it is real competition and not the kind of competition Microsoft plays such as buying up another vendors customers and paying them to use Microsoft's technology. Apple came out with a great piece of hardware and software to back it up and they took over the mess which was also called "the smartphone market". That was three years ago and Microsoft has come up with pretty much nothing comparable on the software side. But what Microsoft had done was pay off every phone vendor at last years big mobile phone conference to _not_ talk about anything but Windows Mobile. So the public and press knew nothing about the Android wave which was about to overflow the market by the end of the year. On the hardware side, in the open platform segment, they have been getting there but still not close to what's been in the iPhone. It again took Apple to put the Cortex-A8 CPU in their phone to get the rest of the market to wake up to the performance levels obtainable using that technology. But like how quickly Apple sprung onto the wasteland which was called the smartphone segment, Google purchased a small company who put together a very nice phone software platform called Android and got it out there. They haven't been paying companies to not talk about other companies products and they know they need to make it as compelling, or better, than the Apple iPhone. Wow, real competition by making good product and competing on quality and value.

This kind of competition does not exist in the markets Microsofts dominates and they continue to use their wealth to limit competition. Just look at the Verizon-Microsoft deal where Microsoft's BING search engine, via an update, replaced all other choices of Blackberry phone user's phones. These exclusionary deals don't result in better product and market choice. So it's great to see Google and Apple competing by making better products and services. And I welcome Apple to the search or mobile ad markets too if it means a better products for consumers. I find it hard to believe that Apple would even consider a play with Microsoft thinking that it will help them compete with Android. Apple makes a good profit off their Mac franchise not by being the lowend player, they do it with quality hardware and software people are willing to pay a bit more for. Same for the iPhone and the iPod. it's good to have real competition in this market. IMO

LoB