“Steve Jobs is walking the same path as Walt Disney,” Jason Schwarz writes for TheStreet.com.
“As soon as California’s Disneyland was completed, Disney knew he had made a terrible mistake by not securing the surrounding real estate,” Schwarz writes. “He had built this wonderful Walt Disney destination but his oversight allowed hotel chains and restaurants to come in and make more money off his customers than he did. So Disney immediately went to Orlando, Fla., and built Disneyworld the right way.”
“The moral of the story is that Apple isn’t something you want to depend on for your livelihood. Jobs’ goal is to build a closed digital neighborhood where Apple controls who makes money and who doesn’t,” Schwarz writes. “I’ll bet that in one of those Apple board meetings that Google CEO Eric Schmidt used to attend, he realized that Jobs was on the verge of building AppleWorld and he’s been scared ever since.”
Schwarz writes, “Google has no moat around its search. Users can change their habits in a day and they will. Jobs thinks mobile advertising is terrible and is ready to revolutionize it with Apple’s purchase of Quattro. Why should he allow Google to make money off the billboards in his neighborhood?”
Schwarz writes, “Apple’s stock is at $210, Google shares are at $585. Twenty-four months from now, the two stocks will have changed places.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dale E.” for the heads up.]
The big if:
• Apple gets into desktop and web search with Spotlight for iPod, iPhone, MacOS X and Safari (low chance)
• MS puts Bing onto all W7 desktops by default through IE and desktop search (assume done)
• FireFox makes Google/Spotlight/Bing equally configurable for all platforms and reaps equal revenues from Google, Apple and MS
No one wins, but the three-way tie removes Google as the current winner.
Wouldn’t it be sweet, if the Mole dug himself a hole.
Which one sounds better – AppleWorld, GoogleWorld, or BingWorld/Microsoftworld?
Except that last one would end up being Microsoft BingWorld Home Premium Edition 2011 SP2a
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Hey Eric,
Once you enter AppleWorld, you have no reason to leave…unless of course you’re not welcome
yep, you can’t leave. could be hotel apple or just like entropy: you can’t win, can’t break even and can’t leave the game.
This is a stupid article all together. There is no real estate issue to not expand upon. Having the ball in your court is something that an innovator deserves the rights to. This digital real estate is also being protected from bad influences, hackers, and from getting convoluted. You can say all you want about how limiting it is… but in the end it’s the best delivery system in the world for such digital media and apps.
– Pi has spoken
Will this be iCal’ed?
Imagine if Apple created their own search engine called Spotlight….
It give me shivers of excitement….
iWorld, the successor to eWorld, in which the e stood for empty.
@ApplePi, are you kidding? This whole thig is about real estate.
This article is probably the most insightful business article I’ve read. This is exactly how Apple operates. I’ve never heard it summed up as well as the Disney analogy (and so appropriate given the fact that Jobs is Disney’s largest shareholder today).
Search is a “when” not an “if”. Apple has the world’s most valuable consumers using their iPods and iPhones to communicate, shop, navigate, read, consume. No doubt Apple can do it better.
Look at what Apple is doing right. Hardware (on the desk, on your lap, in you pocket, in the server room, eventually in your living room) home-grown apps (iLife, iWork) 3rd party apps, retail, media sales, customer service, etc, etc. They’re all very profitable, and with a small market share, they all have a huge amount of room to grow.
Now look at Google. They do one thing well. They don’t have more than a fledgling effort in any other area. They can’t even build a decent word processor. The one thing they do well at and there’s no room to grow. On the contrary, if someone like Apple ever decided to innovate in the search area, it would be relatively easy to win market share. With the high-end of the world’s consumers, advertisers will flock to their offering.
But this isn’t just about Google’s turf. Look how Apple is aproaching every aspect of what they do. Ultimately Google (and even search as a whole) is one tiny part of it.
Eventual world domination.
Hell, I’d be satisfied with Tiger’s harem.
I agree with disposablidenty Disney was so fixated on his amusement park that he didn’t look at the big picture…so he started over, neither google nor microsoft have the aability to see the big picture and now that Jobs has begun expanding apple into new areas at meteor like speeds its too late. The will never catch up, all they can do is sit and watch apple speed out of sight around the next bend and hope that he crashes. That is the only way they will catch up. But Steve has the next 20 years laid out–and it will be the best ride of our lives!
That article is well written. It’s like I was reading a war strategy book. Crisp!
i will indeed enter a few call and put option trades just before quarterly is released (just prior to market closing) and pre Tablet.
in other words… it can either shoot up high and fall like a rock if the Tablet is perceived to be less than innovated or limited in some way… whether it involved hardware/software/partner content.
a lot of trades will be moving those 3 days… hope to get in on some of it…
The writing is on the wall for Google. What we are witnessing is a repeat of ‘Netscape’ in which Apple will dump the search giant and jump into bed with Microsoft (to universal gasps) for its strategic advantage.
Apple desperately needs Murdoch’s vast (and soon to be paid-for) portfolio of News International titles available for its tablet. Google is not playing ball with Murdoch – both in terms of removing unpaid-for content from its search results and in sharing ad revenue with the media baron… Microsoft Bing is. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what conditions have been placed on the negotiating table if Jobs wants Murdoch’s vast global news empire available on the Apple tablet (one of its key selling points)… or where such a deal will leave Google in the near future.
Yeah by manipulating
http://www.bing.com When it comes to decisions that matter, Bing & Decide
Somehow I don’t think so. Search, as I have said elsewhere, requires a great deal of money and a great number of smart people to make work. Apple has a very long way to catch google in search. In fact apple would probably bankrupt itself trying to do so. And for what? So it can be microsh*t and try to get into everything and succeed at nothing, except losing vast sums of money. Jobs targets money through innovation and marketbuilding, not marketshare and that he does thorugh utilizing apple’s stengths and maintaining a core business. Diversifcation is often necessary but the barriers to entry in search are VERY high. Apple doesn’t really seem to have the right intellectual ecosystem for search.
Personally I find it repugnant that jobs would get into bed with ballmer. It’d make him a real whore. Good luck with that. What gives apple it’s glow for a number of people is that it is the alternative to microsh*t- the anti-microsh*t; that it is outside the beige world of conformity and like; that it represent quality and differencing. Somebody at apple seems to have read Michael E Porter…
So this dumping of apple for bing…only about 80+% of the world uses google, despite microsh*t’s best efforts (bing’s marketshare dropped last month anyway), that’s a big number to walk away from or make life a little more different. Users are notoriously bad at just accepting default settings (how else to explain people using IE) but also getting annoyed when default settings aren’t the ones they want (never mind working to how to change them). So good luck annoying your customers.
And recall: this is just speculation anyway. Since when does Jobs EVER telegraph his moves??? Never.
<u>”of TheStreet.com”</u>
No matter how much you like what he’s saying, he’s still from TheStreet.com. If you don’t know what that means, take a look at what else these guys say. It’s either “Apple will rule the world!” or “Apple is doomed!” – probably depending on which way they’d like to see the stock price go.