Daring Fireball: Hope You Enjoy the Smell of Napalm in the Morning
Google, clearly, knows what it’s getting into. This story from The Times on Wednesday reports that Google, working with Intel and Sony, is also working on a competitor to Apple TV (and thus the iTunes Store for video). The unofficial partnership Apple and Google forged a decade ago grew during a period when the two companies were focused on very different markets. Now, their sights for the coming decade are on the same markets: mobile computing devices and entertainment. Post-PC computing, if you will.
Apple faces more decisions than Google in such a war, because Apple has products that use Google services; Google doesn’t have products that use Apple services. Those rumors that Safari and/or MobileSafari might switch to Bing as the default search engine? I give more credence to them now. The problems for Apple there are that (a) Microsoft is every bit as hell-bent as Google to take on the iPhone; and (b) Bing, improved though it may be, is not as good a search engine as Google.
I can’t see Apple building its own search engine, but perhaps they really are building their own maps service — hence their purchase of PlaceBase last July.