Just a few years ago, Apple and Google were the darling couple of the technology industry, with Apple igniting a revolution in smartphone design and Google showing the power of its Web-based services transitioned to the mobile realm. However, with Apple’s forthcoming iOS 6 and Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Apple is continuing to erode Google’s presence in its desktop and (particularly) mobile operating systems, rolling out its own cloud services, search, and now mapping technologies that Apple wants to not only replace Google’s technology, but outshine it too.
How is Apple cutting Google out of its ecosystem, where did the rancor come from, and who has the most to lose: Apple, for not including Google’s widely used and (arguably) best-in-class services, or Google, for being cut out of one of the most visible (and most lucrative) platforms in the industry?
Siri, Maps, and iOS 6
Apple’s public assault on Google began in earnest in iOS 5 with two key technologies. The first is the very visible Siri voice-activated personal assistant that Apple unveiled with the iPhone 4S — for many people it’s the sole feature that distinguishes the iPhone 4S from its predecessors. However, the second was that Apple rolled its own geocoder into iOS 5. Briefly, a geocoder is a service that translates the location data supplied by GPS (and, sometimes, augmented by Wi-Fi or cell tower data) to a usable street address. Neither technology totally slammed the door for Google on iOS, but — like the sword of Damocles — they should have made Google sweat.
Siri is a threat to Google because it inserts itself between iPhone users and their mobile searches — and, if it’s effective enough, it can become the preferred method for conducting searches with an iOS device. Siri doesn’t just use speech recognition technology to understand what people say and translate it into a Web search — whether powered by Google, Bing, or another search engine. When possible, Siri tries to answer users queries directly. Of course, behind the scenes, Siri is tapping into semantic search technologies powered by the likes of Wolfram Alpha (for facts and figures) and Yelp (for location-based information). The bottom line: Any question Siri can answer successfully without resorting to a Web search is a search query that Google (or another search engine) does not receive. With iOS 6, Apple is bringing Siri to the iPad 2 — which means even more searches diverted from Google. (...)
Facebook integration
Another potentially major feature coming to iOS 6 is Facebook integration, enabling users to share and update photos, locations, events, and contact info via Facebook without having to jump out to a separate Facebook application — much like iOS 5′s integration with Twitter.
How is this a shot across Google’s bow? Bluntly: it’s not Google+.
by Geoff Duncan, Digital Trends | Read more:
Illustration: courtesy of zentilia/Shutterstock
