Thursday, January 21, 2010 |
07:12 - Reinventing Wheels
http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_google_bing_search
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The moment before I read the following paragraph, I was thinking, "Hey, wait a minute—why wouldn't Apple just do their own search engine? It's not like they haven't jumped two-footed into every other market in the last ten years against established monolithic competitors."
But then here’s the really interesting part of BusinessWeek’s report, buried in the last paragraph:
Even if it’s consummated, an Apple-Bing deal may prove short-lived. The person familiar with Apple’s thinking says Apple has a “skunk works” looking at a search offering of its own, and believes that “if Apple does do a search deal with Microsoft, it’s about buying itself time.” Given the importance of search and its tie to mobile advertising — and the iPhone maker’s desire to slow Google — “Apple isn’t going to outsource the future.”
Which is intriguing if true, and helps Apple’s negotiations with both Microsoft and Google even if it isn’t.
Talk about feeling one's oats. I remember when Jobs stood on stage in 2003 and said "We did our own browser!" Even taking into account the preexisting KHTML codebase, that took stones, and I didn't even remotely see it coming. Since then we've seen iWork (vs. Office), the iPhone ("walking in" against Palm), and now whatever the Tablet is going to be against Amazon.
If there's any market Apple isn't competing in nowadays (or planning to), surely it's because they see no future in it.
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