A daily digest of IT news, curated from blogs, forums and news sites around the web each morning. We highlight the key commentary and demystify the real story.
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) fears that Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) Siri app is a strategic threat to Google's dominance in search. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder if the recent Siri outage affects that position.
Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: Solving the Earth's population crisis...
Jonny Evans says Google's "bitten off more than it can chew"... oh, wait:
[I]t's not me who is saying this, but Google. "Apple has launched an entirely new approach to search technology with Siri,"...said Schmidt in a written submission to the Senate's antitrust subcommittee. ... He sees Siri as a big threat, and argues that ...Twitter and Facebook also threaten the Googleplex..
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It is open to question how serious a threat Apple's beta Siri technology really is. ... However, I expect it -- and other future Apple technologies, including Maps -- will take a chunk out of its former ally. And Schmidt seems to agree.
Zack Whittaker adds context:
Apple and Google...up until recently, were married in the technology world. ... [It] has since become clear that Apple was to divorce itself from the search giant.
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Schmidt, who currently serves as Googles executive chairman...needs to convince primarily the U.S. authorities...that Google is not anti-competitive. ... [To] come across as wounded and the victim in all of this will score Schmidt bonus points. ... [And] it needs...not to call Siri anti-competitive in itself, to push others into thinking it is.
And Oonagh Reidy reads the runes:
Dont make me laugh. Google is far from a search dominatrix. ... So says Chairman Eric Schmidt.
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Last year, Schmidt denied Apple was a threat to Google, but now admits his previous statment was "wrong." ... He also cited rival search engine Bing. ... [A] possible Yahoo takeover would push its share of search market to 80%...and could be one of the reasons Google are playing down its mammoth power.
But Adrian Covert goes undercover:
[O]ne must take this with a grain of salt. Schmidt was responding to questions posed during an antitrust hearing. ... [He] also skewed statistics to make it sound like the iPhone had a higher marketshare than Android handsets.
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Are the search capabilities of Siri, who can interpret conversational speech, a glimpse at the future?
Meanwhile, Matthew Panzarino seems to say, "Well, duh":
Being reliant on a competitors products...is never a great idea, and you can be sure that Apple knows it.
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Apple is effectively supporting their competitors products to the tune of 250M installed devices. This is something that has to change and Apple knows it.
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Google won a bidding war with Microsoft to make its search product the default on the iPhone. ... This battle to be the default...happened before Android was announced by Google. ... [A]ll it would take is for that deal to run out and for Apple to flip the default search option over to Bing to make the iPhone a nearly Google-search-free platform overnight.
