With Google seemingly untouchable in conventional online search, how will they fare in the Mobile market? With Apple favouring Bing on their hugely popular iPhone, could Google suffer a mobile search slide?
Without question, the mobile Internet is going to become an increasingly important battlefield for the major search engines. Google have already announced their intentions with the release of their Android operating system and their first dedicated Google phone, the Nexus One. Last week Apple waded in by announcing their intention to include Bing as the iPhone’s default search browser. So where will it all end?
Google and Apple appear to be at loggerheads over just about everything currently. Microsoft and Google have always enjoyed a frosty relationship with rival products in a wide variety of sectors. But despite the strength of their competitors, Google have always remained relatively unscathed in their core market (search), whilst also gaining footholds elsewhere (Chrome OS, Chrome browser and Android); however, could a massive increase in mobile search scupper them?
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They said it could never last, and sure enough, after a tumultuous three year relationship plagued by anti-trust legislators, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has parted company with Apple. The growing conflicts in interests between the two technology titans made Schmidt’s position on the Apple look increasingly untenable, and so it has proven with the announcement that he will be stepping down on their board.
It’s not hard to see why so many viewed Schmidt’s alignment with Apple as potentially anti-competitive. With Google already dominating the search market and diversifying elsewhere, Apple have rebuilt a technology empire around the Mac, iPod (including iTunes) and iPhone. With the release of the Android phone operating system, Google found themselves in direct competition with Apple; something which would not have been openly welcomed by Steve Jobs et al.
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Integrating technologies and sharing information for a common purpose is by no means a new thing in the business world. However, Google and Apple appear to have taken things a little too far with both companies now the subject of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation.
The FTC anti-trust suit relates to directors Eric Schmidt and Arthur Levinson sitting on the board of both Google and Apple, contravening the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1941. This essentially means that the two are accused of having a common link which may be detrimental to competition, most notably Microsoft. If the two main competitors to Microsoft’s computing dominance are found to be in cahoots, they could very well find themselves in some pretty deep water; but this is certainly one news story that will rumble on for some time to come.
Search specialists Google haven’t been without controversy in recent months, particularly in the UK with their Street View application drawing criticism for invasion of privacy. Whilst this anti-trust case clearly a little more serious (for the company at least), their continued superiority over Internet search engine usage and marketing is unlikely to be greatly affected, whatever the outcome.
