“Google has been the new Microsoft for so long that this shouldn’t surprise anyone: nearly everything that happens on the internet touches Google in some way, giving the company nearly incomprehensible power,” Nilay Patel writes for The Verge. “It’s way beyond obvious things like search and YouTube, each of which are behemoths in their own right — it’s all the way down to Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers ad server and Google Analytics, which sit behind almost every major website. Google knows so much about how people spend their time and money on the web that it can easily make or break any new businesses it wants. This power is so huge that European countries keep threatening to break Google up, just as Microsoft was constantly under regulatory threat at home and abroad.”
“Facebook is the new AOL. Just think about it for a minute. Of course Facebook is the new AOL. Facebook is the beginning and the end of the internet for a huge number of normal people, a combination of primary service provider (user profiles, messaging, photo sharing) and ’90s-style portal to the wider web. Facebook has its own IM platform, Messenger, just like AOL had AOL Instant Messenger. Then it went and bought WhatsApp, the messaging platform more popular internationally, just like AOL bought ICQ. Facebook groups are just AOL chat rooms; Facebook’s permanently doomed commerce plays are AOL’s permanently doomed commerce plays,” Patel writes. “And Facebook’s core business of selling ads into the News Feed is the same combination of incredibly vulnerable and apocalypse-proof as AOL’s dial-up business: it will continue minting money for as long as the parents and grandparents of the world start their day with Facebook, and it will stop growing the second all of their kids move on to something better.”
“Apple is the new Sony,” Patel writes. “Sony was a hardware juggernaut in the ’90s — it made the most beautiful gadgets, had the most iconic product lines, and commanded premium prices even when the products were mostly similar to other competitors… While Sony’s failure to understand software allowed Apple and then Samsung to overtake its core businesses, it’s Apple’s failure to understand services that remains its critical weakness… Apple still hasn’t figured out how to expand its platforms onto the wider internet in a way that makes them feel as safe and broadly available as Google; the best-known thing iCloud’s ever done is leak nude photos. Solving this problem is where Apple needs to spend the most of its energy.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: First off, it’s no secret that we believe that Apple needs to focus on quality software and services. But, even if Apple doesn’t get their act together and again start releasing the type of intuitive, rock solid software that their longtime users expect, they have much more money than Sony ever had and their hardware quality is so good that the risk of them declining as precipitously as Sony is remote. Cook’s top focus should be identifying bugs and squashing them while getting Apple’s myriad services to work as advertised.
Secondly, not mentioning Google’s iOS knockoff in relation to Microsoft’s Mac OS knockoff when describing Google as the new Microsoft is inexplicable/delusional.
And, in closing, Facebook is for moms™.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “David G.” for the heads up.]