Things are getting downright ugly. Apple and Google, once the best of friends, seem to have devolved into the bitterest of enemies. The tactics have become dirty. The blows are getting dangerously close to the belt. And I couldn’t be happier.
Unlike real wars, when corporations battle it’s often the common person that prospers. We’re seeing honest-to-goodness tooth-and-nail competition take place, and it’s the consumer and marketers that will come out on top regardless of which behemoth wins the fight.
The blows toward the end of 2009 were focused mostly on mobile. Google Voice was blocked from the App Store, and the FCC started poking into the matter – specifically Apple’s Control of the app economy. In short order, Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board. Then the Motorola Droid came, and the marketing that placed Android’s features directly in competition with Apple’s iPhone OS. Apple then acquired Lala, a streaming music service, near immediately after Google started using the streams in their search results. Following this, Google announced they were moving acquire AdMob (still pending FTC approval), an advertising network that served ads into iPhone apps and a company Apple had been trying to acquire prior to Google outbidding them. In turn, Apple bought up ad network Quattro Wireless. As 2009 came to a close, rumors of both an Apple tablet device and a Google built phone competed for headlines. Continue reading “Apple-Google catfight is good for consumers”
At the Android press event this morning, Google turned the wireless industry on its head. Â On the surface, it looked like Google only introduced a new (albeit very slick) phone, the NexusOne. Â But below the surface, there’s a lot more going on.
The smartphone market seems to be shoe-in: Apple has got momentum in the space reminiscent of their takeover of the MP3 player market years prior with the iPod. Despite this momentum, the discerning media planner working on mobile for six months out should take note – Google’s Android is poised to crash Apple’s party.
Email marketers are in a dire situation. Many of them don’t know it yet. One of the major activities for smartphone users involves checking email. For marketing emails, while the current best practices dictate formatting emails to support both text-only and HTML email clients, the HTML versions don’t scale well to smaller devices. This is a big problem.
The promise has hung around mobile for years: Just pay with your phone. When any extra inconvenience can result in a lost sale, ease and convenience are paramount. The mobile promise of engaging with a customer anywhere, and immediately converting that engagement to a sale, has been the penultimate retail fantasy. So why has it taken so long to start to see this behavior?
There were a few big announcements regarding the iPhone and iPod Touch at WWDC this week. The biggest announcement was actually just a price drop: With the iPhone 3G at only $99, it hits the magical price point that’s going to move a lot of phones. Though admittedly, there is still a large issue in the monthly costs to AT&T, as a plan with unlimited data and text is going to be more per month than the phone costs.
Social media has infiltrated the hemispheres of today’s society by embedding itself into the framework of business interactions, personal relationships, mobile distractions, television and other elements that shape our culture. While some situations and technologies adapt quickly to the transparency and hyper-connectedness of social media, other avenues take time to get used to the idea. One such avenue is books.
