Searching for War, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #184 | @MDWorld

June 12, 2012 Arthur Tebbel 0 Comments

Dear Art,
I’m sure you remember the media frenzy that accompanied the release of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs where he reported Jobs would “go to thermonuclear war” over his perception that Google copied iOS with our Android operating system.  While it was certainly a troubling quote and definitely informed the numerous lawsuits that Apple has entered into over the last couple years we never quite understood the extent of their aims until yesterday.  At their Worldwide Developers Conference Apple announced a number of features that seemed aimed at taking their users away from our services.  Chief among these was a new mapping application that will be the new default for iPhones.  Business Insider goes a step further and says that the new services in Siri are essentially designed to take users away from Google searches.  How worried should we be about this supposed war?  Are we capable of fighting back?
-Larry Page, CEO, Google Inc.

Larry,
This is a hard question to answer.  Would I be afraid if a company with a market cap of $540 billion was dedicated to my destruction?  Absolutely.  That said, my market cap is about $0 and your company’s is about $180 billion so there’s definitely a substantive difference in our situations.  Let me try to put myself mentally in the place of a giant corporation and I’ll tackle this.  This shouldn’t be too hard because corporations are people and I should be able to empathize.

Siri is not a realistic threat to Google in the search sphere.  Looking over my own recent Google searches on my phone they aren’t really things I would use Siri for.  I need search on my phone for things like checking quotes, seeing if people were in specific movies, looking up products I see in the supermarket and “sodium nightmares” for some reason.  I don’t think Siri is what you need to be worried about if you’re concerned with losing the 20-something comedian market; you need to be worried about a competently made IMDB app.  And me eating less salt apparently.  If you’re really worried perhaps you should consider a commercial where John Malkovich is searching for some jokes.  That seems to be going over like gangbusters.

There’s a simple reason you have nothing to worry about: Android is way bigger than iOS.  You lead in market share and have a dominant position in new activations that should continue until whichever month the new iPhone comes out and then you’ll take a quarter off and come back strong again.  There are dozens if not hundreds of Android phones in the marketplace compared to three iPhones.  No amount of posturing on Apples’ part is going to seriously affect your bottom line.  If your mobile map application is better than Apple’s you could even probably make some cash by selling to the Apple users who will suddenly be without it.  Barring a stunning patent decision nothing will stop our mobile phone supremacy.  Now please don’t take my email account away, I told you what you want to hear.