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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."
Apple is a great company, but they are not large enough to build their own search engine, advertising platform, and back end services to run them. Microsoft's search (bing), advertising platform, and back end services are all designed for partnering - its the core business model.
of course, Microsoft will compete with Apple in the phone space at some point in the future (we are clearly uncompetitive now...), but if Apple is going to be in bed with a competitor, its much better that it be Microsoft rather than google - better for both companies. I mentioed this to Symbolset in a post here.
Jibe!
That's it! Apple is done now too! Another nail in their coffin!
I haven't used M$ or Apple since 1935 except for at work, when i play games or when I want to do anything except browse the web.
OpenMoko! OpenMoko!
i may not be able to run apps but I can mod my phones OS... if only I knew how to code.
This conspiracy theory is half baked. Google's core business is search. And based on what we've seen from the Nexus One so far, apple has nothing to fear whatsoever from google in the mobile phone market. The Nexus One hardware is nice, but the software is crap. It's not even remotely a threat to apple's iPhone market. And don't forget that apple sells computers and mp3 players too. This is not enough for apple to ally with Microsoft. They tried that once before, and they got IE for mac out of it. They've learned from that mistake.
I see very little chance of Apple using Bing as the default search provider on the iPhone. More likely they'd want MS to provide ultra compatible Office apps for the iPhone to help them get into the business smartphone market, competing directly with RIM / Blackberry.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Jobs thinks everything Microsoft does is second-rate. He won't team up with them for that reason alone, never mind the fact that Apple has been burned by trusting Microsoft in the past, and I can't see that mistake being made again.
~Philly
granted its 'new to google' to be you know selling phones directly .. but this is not a "war" with carriers or handset makers, its more of a war on.. noone?
Its really not that much different from going to the HTC website and clicking buy now and being directed to a web seller of any given phone as well as the carriers who sell them.. all google is REALLY doing here is creating a platform they can use to advertise android.. by that I mean.. when Verizon is done spamming millions of Droid Does! ads.. Android is left with being just another handset in the carriers collection of handsets.. by creating a direct way of buying , they have more importantly created a direct "sales conduit" that showcases Android and only android devices..
For all intents and purposes this is no different than the ADP1 and ADP2 only now rather than buying unlocked, you buy them with tmobile service, which was the only place the unlocked dev phones worked in 3g anyhow.
If Google was trying to be a gamechanger, they would have become an MVNO buying bandwidth from t-mobile, and reselling it (at reduced rates) in exchange for advertising/collecting demographic data from all the buyers, possibly even going with a pure GoogleVoice device that was IP only and no actual telephone service..
Now if they would just fix the fragmented Android mess of a landscape, do away with the half-assed java applets and move to entirely native apps.. as well as license SenseUI from HTC OR convince HTC to offer its app stack over the marketplace.. they could almost become a decent size player in the mobile space.. until then.. MS/Nokia and Apple will contine to eat their lunch.. Pity that Google didn't buy Palm and kill the Pre before it shipped as it too is hurting Android's long term viability as a platform.
Yeah, a company whose entire business is predicated on cool can't partner with uncool. Uncool is contagious. Cool isn't.
Google bought a mobile ad company called AdMob.
Apple bought a mobile ad company called Quattro.
Whatever happened to doing things in-house?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't know. I've always used Google for search the last several years. I also have a Droid phone. But just yesterday I was writing some documentation for some code I wrote to help manage the driver store on Windows. I needed to add some links to further information about driver INF files on the MS site. I went to google and did a search. I realized quickly that at some point over the last few years Google has changed the way their links work. They no longer are a link to the site you want - they are a link to something at Google that then redirects to your chosen site. Since I have no idea how long those links will work, they were useless to me (I wanted to right-click and copy shortcut / copy link and paste it into my documentation as further reading - but some link to Google that may work fine for today and maybe not work fine next year isn't all that handy). I copied my search from Google and pasted it into Bing. I got pretty much the same results, but a right-click and copy shortcut actually got me the real URL and I could then paste it into my doc. I don't even know when Google changed this so that their links aren't real links to sites - but stuff like that could drive me permanently to Bing.
To avoid Microsoft Apple could buy whatever is left of AltaVista. And then we'll have Apple Vista. No, wait...
Apple has shown a clear desire to not remain glued to Microsoft. This is evident with the release of iWork and the dead-end path of the Office products on the Apple platform.
Because of my position, I have almost every handheld and PDA device that hits the market. As a seasoned .NET developer, I am biased towards Microsoft. However, that being said, the Windows Mobile platform is horrible. Even on devices like Samsung's Omnia, it is sluggish and cumbersome at best. Memory management is a nightmare.
The only realistic path is for the Windows Mobile platform to die off or be revamped from scratch. At most they may build a mobile version of Office for iPhone and Android but even that is a stretch.
It does do that. For example googling for "Slashdot" returns a link that on mouse over show as "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot" in the status bar, but in fact is http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&ved=0CBkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSlashdot&rct=j&q=slashdot&ei=-FJTS6eACaKmnQOhmKCTCg&usg=AFQjCNEZ2izp-RcQ2rEPNchi1qS-mPpnRA
It does this both logged in and logged out.
Why is it always "war"? You know, it's just possible that the market for mobile phones is large enough to support many different vendors. Apple has consistently shown that they're happy with just a portion of the markets they play in--provided it's the most lucrative end of that market. The iPod is more an anomaly than the norm in terms of how Apple approaches its various markets. Google and Apple stand to gain more here if they continue to cooperate than if they become all out adversaries.
No this does not make perfect sense. Steve has a feud with Bill going back to NeXT. Sorry, but this will never fly. Apple has made their continent and are growing it.
Not for me. My status bar shows the correct link, and when I right click and ask to copy the link, the correct link goes to my clipboard. Could it be a browser thing? What browser are you using?
Seems like it is browser dependent. On Firefox I get a modified URL in clipboard, but in Chrome, Safari and Opera the actual URL.
When you click on it, you actually go to the redirector, which counts the click (to rank things people click on higher) and then bounces you to the right place. I think that the href in the link loads pointing to the redirector and then the JavaScript rewrites it to point to the real site so that the status bar and copy work.
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This story sounds like fluff intended to stir the pot. I'm sure people at Apple are keeping their eye on Google and certainly they must realize that your average consumer can only remain loyal so long before they start craving something new and different. However, to suggest that they'll somehow be driven to work with Microsoft simply because of a threat from Google seems ridiculous at best.
Apple is a hardware maker, first and foremost, while both Google and Microsoft are software companies. And Apple has the advantage over the other two that they do also very good resources on the software side. This ensures that in this market Apple will always have the advantage because of far superior integration. Software and hardware is developed concurrently under a unified visions. The other guys basically develop the software then find a vendor to provide a phone that meets certain requirements. And because both Microsoft and Google provide their OSs for a variety of phones it inherently means their systems are compromised. It's far more difficult to provide a unified, closely maintained platform and an integrated app store. And Apple has managed to keep very tight control over their phone despite offering it on AT&T. Most other smartphones are crippled by the garbage service providers dump on there, and I'm not sure the hardware makers have the luxury of making demands.
For Microsoft, and presumably Google once their OS becomes more widespread we are going to see the same kinds of issues with PCs. Apple again wins with integration. The others have to make do with whatever the hardware makers decide to include with the OS.
As for the search engines, those are pretty much irrelevant. Google and Bing are pretty much the only top tier search engines out there. From my experience they produce results of comparable quality. What matters, however is advertising and web apps especially for businesses. One of the big reasons we use Google at my company is because the analytics and extensive marketing resources, and obviously, because it's currently got the biggest market share. I think Microsoft is at a disadvantage here mainly because they're still a more traditional software developer although they obviously have the resources and the experience. In this market Apple is really a non-entity. They've got great OSs and perhaps an app or two that stand out and that's it. I routinely use their iWork suite and am not impressed by it at all. It's no more intuitive than Office and is generally less powerful. Office is still the better suite.
I think ultimately the question is, is Apple looking to compete directly with Google and MS. I realize that the pundits are always clamoring for this sort of direct competition with anything that's even remotely similar but at this point I don't yet see it. It would be a very different focus for Apple. I do think if they were going to take this route it would make sense that they acquired a smaller search engine company and then work on it internally. Partnerships don't always turn out well for Apple and they don't really sync well with the company's focus on integration.
The actual link --- the actual href attribute of the HTML <a> tag --- is http://slashdot.org/. In Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, if you Copy shortcut, it copies as http://slashdot.org. But Firefox is sniffing a little further and sees that a JavaScript event handler is attached to each link that redirects them. I'm sure that this extra sniffing by Firefox is not what Google intended. I think Google wanted you get the actual link if needed, else they would not have gone through the trouble of doing the redirects in JavaScript. I also think that this further sniffing might be a new feature in Firefox, because Google has always done their links this way (HTML has real link, JavaScript adds the redirect).
The onmousedown bit calls a JavaScript function to do that.
They're also committed to Plays4Sure, MS Java and COM.
Help stamp out iliturcy.