Quote:
Originally Posted by Phone Booth
The recent iOS Maps fiasco is an illustration of a possible trend I was talking about earlier - that the smartphone market is increasingly becoming part of the broader online services market. Obviously Apple's management is smart enough to get this, which is why they pushed Siri before it was ready and are working to remove Google's presence from iOS devices. They have no choice but to build up their online service offerings, because increasingly, that's where differentiation will occur.
The problem is that I just don't see how Apple can win this war. Microsoft is a lot better than Apple at delivering online services, from infrastructure to software development to data-gathering, have been throwing billions of dollars at the problem and are a distant 2nd or worse in every single one of Google's core markets. Apple has approximately zero presence in search, zero presence in email - almost no one chooses to use Apple software or services on a neutral platform without having to interact with an Apple device. Why does a smartphone maker need a search engine? Well, what is Google Maps? It's a location search engine that displays results on a map. At this point, it's close to impossible to do maps as well as Google without having a comparable search engine, let alone mapping and location data. To compete with Google on maps, Apple has to duplicate much of the effort Google already puts into collecting data and refining its search results, only without the same ability to monetize it.
This man knows what he's talking about.
Plus, the problem isn't going to be solved easily with money. Apple just doesn't have the talent in the right areas to exceed in this area like Google does. Their only option is to try to steal away talent from Google, but:
1. It will be costly and reduce morale when existing employees realize they are getting paid much less than employees working on the maps product.
2. Will still take a long time to accumulate critical mass of engineering talent to even start to begin doing what Google has done over the past 8 years.
3. A lot of Google's top engineering talent has philosophical reasons why they would never work for Apple (and money, to them, is usually not as big of a deal) or Facebook (for that matter).
Acquisitions won't work either, as a lot of the smaller companies are just "C" type players (
http://blog.telemapics.com/?p=399).