Sunday, September 30, 2012
The new
iPhone came out a few weeks back. Again thousands
of Apple aficionados stood in line in front of the Apple temples to be the
first to spend handsome sums to be able to have the state of the art
product. For sure the new iPhone, and
all its previous iterations, is a marvelous product and has forced other
manufacturers to develop innovative designs to compete. For the most part this competition has
benefited the customers especially the ones that can wait a few months for the
prices to drop and the other phone makers to find legal ways of cloning Apple’s
features.
All is not
well in the Apple orchard, however. Some
iPhone users are getting lost. The new
iPhone does not have a built in app for Google Maps. Instead Apple has included its own Map app. It was only a matter of hours after the first
new phones were in consumers’ hands that it became apparent that this app was
not ready for prime time. Even die hard
Apple acolytes complained that the software was lacking. David Pogue of the New York Times, perhaps
the most respected technology writer in the country and not one to mince words,
wrote, “It may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple
has ever unleashed.”
So what’s
up here? Why did Apple decide to drop Google Maps? It comes down to (you guessed it) MONEY. The two companies once got along quite well
but that was when Google was essentially a search engine and Apple a hardware
manufacturer. Today Google has branched
out into all sorts of software, provides email service to millions and has
aggressively moved into the smart phone and tablet computer business. Apple certainly continues to make outstanding
products but other services like the iTunes Store and several proprietary apps
like FaceTime and Siri are aimed at Google’s sweet spot.
So Apple decided that they should ignore Google Maps on
the new iPhone. You can install it
yourself. They also decided to do the
same with the YouTube app. YouTube is
another Google product.
Competition
has always been a part of American business.
Apple has been and continues to be fiercely competitive and often this
competition has benefited the consumer.
This time I think that Apple’s decision has been a real negative for the
consumer. I disagreed with the decision
a few years ago to refuse to allow Adobe Flash to run on new Apple
devices. I agreed that Flash was old
technology but that decision made the consumer have to scramble to find a way
to play a Flash formatted video from the web.
At that time Flash was almost the de facto standard. The decision to eschew Google apps is the
latest example of putting competition before customer service.
Go ahead
Apple and Google…have your fight. May
the best company win. Just don’t let
your fight make my life difficult.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home