The Gillmor Gang conflated two major stories this week into one: Apple’s terms of service for app store approval, and Twitter’s actions regarding UberMedia. The noise regarding Apple being hauled in front of the DOJ illustrates just how powerful Apple’s strategy continues to be. As many point out, Android’s market share makes it virtually impossible to tar iOS with monopoly status. It’s almost as though Erick and Steve planned it that way, right down to Google following up with its 90% scenario as if to validate Apple’s 70% model.
Stephen Elop also made that point with his decision to let Microsoft acquire Nokia, reminiscent of Yahoo’s failure to notice the ballgame was over when Ballmer pulled the trigger on them a few years ago. Then it was a seat at the search table; today it’s a seat at the mobile one. If Danny Sullivan was right that Google could have matched Microsoft’s offer, then the real question was why they didn’t. Perhaps because giving away 70% of the smartphone market licenses would underline how Google’s search monopoly revenue was being used to buy the way into mobile, a much more DOJ-ish infraction.
That’s why the crocodile tears shed by publishers and the open except for Flash crowd fail to resonate. Google can afford to give away its store service for 10% because they don’t make money on free OS’s and apps. Microsoft needs to spend billions on Nokia to buy what Android has done. Let’s guess at what that ransom works out to in appstore dollars — maybe 20%. And Apple has invested enormously in squeezing the record cartel, the carriers, and now who? The publishers? I think not. If developers need to make a choice of investment, are they going to bolt iOS in favor of an ad model that may be under attack from Facebook?
As Twitter fleshes out its platform in a very Apple-like way, developers are beginning to notice the stability that effective control of the realtime message stream offers. Facebook ROI is already double that of Twitter messages, harnessing the social edge that leads to authority and decision making velocity. This forces Google to expand its social search integration, which benefits Twitter given Facebook’s lack of two-way flow in the global conversation. At least President Obama understands why Twitter deserves to be at the dinner table.
@dannysullivan @scobleizer @kevinmarks @jtaschek @stevegillmor
Steve Gillmor is a technology commentator, editor, and producer in the enterprise technology space. He is Head of Technical Media Strategy at salesforce.com and a TechCrunch contributing editor. Gillmor previously worked with leading musical artists including Paul Butterfield, David Sanborn, and members of The Band after an early career as a record producer and filmmaker with Columbia Records’ Firesign Theatre. As personal computers emerged in video and music production tools, Gillmor started contributing to various publications, most notably Byte Magazine,...
John Taschek is vice president of strategy at salesforce.com. He is responsible for corporate product strategy, corporate intelligence and market influence. Taschek came to company in 2003, bringing over 20 years of technology evaluation experience. Taschek currently is also the editorial director for CloudBlog - an independent blog run as an adjunct to salesforce.com’s web properties. He occasionally is on Steve Gillmor’s The Gillmor Gang enterprise web video-cast. Previously, Taschek ran the testing labs at eWEEK (formerly PC Week) magazine....
Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade. Danny’s expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline. Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they...
Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. He is best known for his popular blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. Scoble joined Microsoft in 2003, and although he often promoted Microsoft products like Tablet PCs and Windows Vista, he also frequently criticized his own employer and praised its competitors like Apple and Google. Scoble is the author of Naked Conversations, a book on how blogs are changing...
Kevin Marks is a software engineer. Kevin served as an evangelist for OpenSocial and as a software engineer at Google. In June 2009 he announced his resignation. From September 2003 to January 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 17 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati,...
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