Category Archives: Developer events

Apple, Developer events, Developers, Google, Microsoft, WWDC, WWDC 2015

Ten quick thoughts on WWDC

Yesterday was a busy day, as these keynote days always are – several hours of waiting around with very little to do, followed by several hours of frenetic activity both during and immediately after the keynote, as I prepare a quick comment for reporters, talk to some reporters, and do quick write-ups for clients. I feel like my head is still spinning, and although I have a variety of things I want to write about, I don’t feel quite ready to do a deep dive on any of them yet. As such, I’m going to do something a bit different – post several short thoughts here, some of which I may expand on with proper blog posts later, and some of which we may talk about on the Beyond Devices Podcast later this week (we’ll be recording Wednesday and the podcast will hopefully go up Thursday).

Music majors on what I said it should

Apple Music majors in part on what I said it should in this piece I wrote back in April – that is, it differentiates partly on the basis that it gives you a single home for your existing collection of music and the new stuff you access through the service, with the ability to easily add new material to your library. I also said in that piece that I thought Apple Music might be most relevant to older folks with more money than free time, and that still feels right.

Beats 1 is a weird hybrid

Beats 1 is a funny mix – neither algorithmic curation nor human, personalized curation, but generic human curation, just like traditional radio. To my mind, Beats 1 is the strangest part of the Music launch – the piece that feels like it doesn’t belong, and perhaps was Apple’s desperate attempt to provide a headline feature to set Apple Music apart from other subscription music services. In my mind, it wasn’t needed – as I said above, I think Apple Music already differentiates itself in the most important way. Then, behind Beats 1 is now hiding a series of more customizable radio stations, which used to be known as iTunes Radio. Lumping all this together as radio also feels like it might be confusing, but at least iTunes Radio is being infused with some Beats smarts, which should make it better. I also wonder if Beats 1 is a concession to trying to appeal to the younger crowd, despite the older appeal I think most of Apple Music will have.

Connect feels more significant

On the other hand, Connect feels more interesting, and more unique. Whereas Spotify (and to a lesser extent Deezer, Rdio etc) has always seemed the target (victim?) of Apple Music, Connect feels like it’s going after SoundCloud and YouTube, where many undiscovered artists make their start. The problem today is that once an artist breaks through they tend to withdraw from these platforms and become increasingly distant from fans. Some artists (Taylor Swift seems a great example) maintain a direct connection with fans through social media, but for many others there’s this disconnect. I feel like Connect could be the first platform that gives artists a home that will work whether they’re undiscovered in their bedroom or coming off a platinum record. Connect also feels like a big tool for appealing to younger users.

The Music launch should have been its own event

Music was the “one more thing” at the end of the keynote, but it really didn’t fit there – in days past, this launch would have had its own event (likely in the fall, Apple’s traditional time for such events), but instead it was squeezed in here. This was a mistake – it didn’t do the service justice, and the Music segment felt rushed and cluttered, but still left all of us somewhat unsure about exactly how it works. It really should have been its own event, separate from WWDC (which is, after all, a developer conference, and there’s no developer angle to Apple Music – yet).

Developer events are getting cluttered

This brings up a broader point – each of the major developer events – Microsoft’s Build, Google’s I/O, and Apple’s WWDC – feels increasingly cluttered. As the aspirations and reach of these companies grows, a single annual two-hour keynote is becoming an increasingly poor way to communicate all that needs to be communicated. Microsoft does two keynotes, which is one way to deal with the problem (Google has done this in the past). But it just highlights the degree to which this two month period in the late spring is becoming a huge pile-up of news, that doesn’t really serve anyone well. All three companies should be thinking about spreading this stuff out more.

The Apple TV news merits its own event too

Speaking of all this, where in the world would Apple have fit the three major pieces of Apple TV news at this year’s WWDC? With a keynote that already felt light on detail and rushed, how could it ever have hoped to also announce new Apple TV hardware, and Apple TV SDK, and the Apple TV service? Thankfully, we didn’t have to find out, and that will likely all be announced together at a later date. I just hope it won’t all be crammed into September’s iPhone event. Perhaps the iPad event in October?

Native apps on Watch are the biggest developer news

Although iOS and OS X are the two big focus areas for WWDC each year, to my mind the most significant news by far was watchOS 2, and especially the ability for developers to create native apps and tap into the hardware and software features of the Watch directly. I’ve always felt that third party apps will be a huge part of the mainstreaming of the Apple Watch (just as they were for the iPhone and iPad before it), but the early model of companion apps and WatchKit just wasn’t going to cut it. I see a huge swathe of much more compelling Watch apps later this year when watchOS 2 becomes available, and I think we’ll see a huge growth and broadening of the appeal of the Watch as a result.

Google and Apple did stability releases while Microsoft goes big

There was some interesting timing this year at the developer events – Apple did its big overhaul of iOS in 2013 and OS X in 2014, while Google also did its major overhaul of Android in 2014. This year, both these companies focused on stability releases with relatively incremental improvements and lots of polish. By contrast, Microsoft is releasing its biggest Windows upgrade in years, across all device categories. I haven’t yet thought through all the implications of that (beyond mere intellectual curiosity), but it’s interesting to ponder.

Siri advancements reinforce Apple’s privacy stance

The Siri announcements were a wonderful validation of the piece I published last week on Apple and privacy. In that piece, I wrote that nothing in Apple’s privacy stance should prevent it from being able to do clever and useful things in iOS and beyond to better serve users with machine learning, and its WWDC announcements reinforced that. Enhancements in Siri and Spotlight are the best examples, but the natural language processing improvements in multiple individual apps are part of this broader picture too.

Apple is retaking control of content

Apple has been big in content for twelve years, since the launch of the iTunes Store in 2013, and continuing with major launches like TV shows and movies in iTunes, iBooks, Newsstand, and so on. However, for the last several years Apple has seemed adrift in content, a victim rather than a driver of trends, and has seen its content revenues stagnate and fall even as third party apps explode (along with the associated revenue stream for Apple). This year, Apple finally seems to be retaking control of control, with the News app, Apple Music, and presumably the Apple TV service later this year. Apple finally seems to be embracing subscriptions in music and video, and recognizing that some of its other content platforms (notably Newsstand) aren’t working and rethinking them. News puts it uniquely in control of a certain form of content, while Music also gives it some unique ownership of artist-created and DJ-created content, which is a fascinating shift.

Android, Developer events, Google, Google I/O

Evaluating Google’s I/O 2015 announcements

I wrote a piece a few days back for Techpinions about the challenges Google needed to address at I/O this year. Now that the I/O keynote is over (which I was fortunate enough to attend in person), I thought I’d revisit that list of challenges to see how Google did.

Retaking control of Android

There were a couple of things that Google did related to retaking control of Android at I/O: reinforcing the value proposition of its Android One initiative, and announcing Android Pay. The former is obvious: it’s Google’s attempt to get a close-to-stock version of Android as the default version in emerging markets. But the latter may be less obvious. However, by launching Android Pay, Google nixes its OEMs’ efforts to introduce their own payment systems, as this post outlines. Samsung is likely to be the hardest hit by this, since it’s the only Android OEM that had launched a payment service. But I wonder how much Google will spread this model of Google Services Mandatory classification for key Android features to other areas, squeezing out OEMs from offering competing services.

Defending the web against apps

This year’s I/O was a mixed bag in this respect, with a couple of initiatives clearly aimed at just this, but some others moving things in the opposite direction. On the one hand, Google announced Chrome Custom Tabs, an alternative to in-app browsers for displaying web content, which brings users back into the web, where Google can better track their activity and otherwise capture data. It also reiterated its app indexing and deep linking projects, which recently began to roll out on iOS too. These efforts are both aimed at making the web more relevant in a world where apps are becoming dominant. Google Now on Tap is an interesting mix in this respect – on the one hand, it allows users to stay in apps when they have Google Now queries, rather than having to exit out of them, which could be seen as favoring apps rather than the web. But on the other hand, this inserts a Google layer between users and apps, in some cases recommending other apps for users to open, but in others using the Google Knowledge Graph to disintermediate those apps.  On balance, Google seems to be serving its own needs pretty well with these new announcements.

Convince developers Android users are worth targeting

There was remarkably little at I/O about why developers should target Android users exclusively or in addition to iOS users. There was no update on the total number of Android users, which remains at “over one billion”. And Google did very little to argue why these users might be attractive, rather emphasizing the fact that many of the new users on Android will come from emerging markets, where there are lower incomes and less propensity to spend. There was no mention of carrier billing at all, and the only mention of monetization was in relation to better ad products within apps rather than paid apps or in-app purchases. I don’t think Google has given up on the paid apps route, but it was hard to escape that impression from the keynote, which I find baffling. To be sure, Android will never have the same attractive demographics as iOS, but it can still do much better than it has in the past, especially in mature markets.

Take Android beyond personal computing devices

The big announcement here was the Brillo project, which takes Android and strips it down to a barebones version for use in Internet of Things devices (and for today at least home devices specifically), together with the Weave communication protocol, which will be baked into Android at the Google Play Services layer and therefore make compatible devices instantly discoverable from Android devices. This is exactly what I was getting at in my preview piece on this topic – a version of Android that’s optimized for these devices, which have no need for the full version of Android but have other specific needs Android in its current form doesn’t meet well. There’s a lot of work still to be done here – though Brillo will launch in Q3 (and Weave in Q4) I sensed many decisions about Brillo still haven’t been made (not least the final name for the OS itself). More broadly, I was disappointed that we didn’t hear more about operating systems for the car, another area I highlighted in my preview piece, and one in which Google has been reported to be making some interesting progress. I wonder if we’ll see more on this in the months building up to the Android M public release.

Demonstrate a clear value proposition in TV

This was the other big area where I was expecting much more from Google’s keynote at I/O than we got – it got barely a mention in the keynote, and the expected announcements were made either not at all or in press releases. Nvidia announced its Shield device built on Android TV, and bought up almost every outdoor advertising spot within a few blocks of the Moscone Center to advertise it, but there was nothing in the keynote to demonstrate meaningful progress in this area. The only other concession to this challenge was the announcement that HBO Now would be coming to Android and Chromecast shortly. Speaking of which, Chromecast has now sold 17 million units, putting it in the same ballpark with Apple TV and Roku. There continues to be an odd disconnect between Chromecast and Android TV in Google’s TV strategy which I hope it can resolve in time. Chromecast certainly seems to be the more successful model so far, though the total number of casts (1.5 billion) relative to the number of Chromecasts sold (17 million) implies relatively low usage of those devices.

Continue to unify Android and Chrome OS

There was even less on this theme at I/O 2015 than there was last year, where Google at least talked about Android apps running on Chrome OS. Chrome OS was barely mentioned at all in the keynote, and there was no news about it at all. This continues to be an area where Google has to do a much better job telling its story and bringing the disparate threads together.

Differentiate against Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud

The whole enterprise space, and cloud in particular, got incredibly short shrift in the keynote too, after a lengthy session in last year’s keynote. There was nothing here to indicate that Google was going to make meaningful progress in this department in the coming year beyond its existing strategies.

Beyond the keynote, and beyond Android

Even though the pace of the keynote and the volume of individual announcements was somewhat overwhelming, as always, the substance of what was announced really wasn’t. The Android M release looks like a very modest, incremental, improvement on Lollipop. This was a little disappointing, but partly reflects the fact that Google is slowly extracting functionality from the operating system and putting it in more easily upgradable layers like Google Play Services instead. The new Photos app is a great example of this. This does mean, however, that the news around new Android version releases is going to become less interesting over time, while the announcements separate from Android will become more interesting in many ways. But this year’s I/O also looks like introducing much more news outside the keynote – I’m writing this on day two of the event, and several announcements around wearables, Google Loon, and other projects have been made separately. As an attendee, I’m grateful that the keynote was trimmed down to just two hours, but it does make it harder to follow all the news that’s coming out of I/O as Google starts to fragment the more notable announcements across sessions.

Build, Developer events, Developers, Microsoft, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Phone

Microsoft’s Build announcements: breaking the vicious circle

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Microsoft’s first-day keynote at its Build developer conference today focused first on Azure and Office platform advancements, but finally moved on to Windows, where the real meat of the day was in my mind. When it comes to Windows, and Windows Phone in particular, one of the key challenges continues to be what I refer to as the user/app vicious circle. Simply put, in our post-iPhone world, when there are no users on a platform it’s tough to attract developers, and when there are few developers and hence few apps, it’s tough to attract users. Windows Phone suffers from a number of issues (see my free in-depth report on the platform), but one of the biggest continues to be the app gap and the app lag.

Attempts to break the vicious circle

The challenge for Microsoft is that’s really tough to break this vicious circle unless you can somehow goose either user numbers or the number of apps. What I saw in today’s keynote was an articulation of Microsoft’s strategy to do both, as shown below:
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Android, App stores, Apple, Developer events, Developers, Google, Google I/O

What we learned at I/O about Google’s app revenue

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With both Apple and Google’s developer events behind us now, we have some useful new numbers to play with, specifically on the amount both companies have disbursed to developers. In today’s Google I/O keynote, Google announced that it had paid developers $5 billion over the past year, and that this was 2.5 times what it had paid developers in the previous twelve-month period. This gives us some really good numbers to start plotting overall Google Play developer payments for the first time. The Wall Street Journal also reported today that Google is now retaining almost all of its 30% cut, as does Apple, rather than giving the majority to carriers as it once did. This, in turn, allows us to calculate Google’s revenues from Google Play as well.

Google is catching up quickly in payments to developers

First, a comparison of quarterly developer payments on both platforms. I’ve filled in the blanks with a nice smooth curve on the Google Play numbers, and although my fairly accurate estimates on the iOS side are pretty lumpy too I’ve smoothed that curve as well to make them easier to compare. (The reality is developer payments go up and down because app spending goes up and down as new devices ship and are sold in large numbers around major launches and the holiday period, for example.)

So here’s a chart comparing developer payments from the two companies since the inception of their respective paid app stores:

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Developer events, Developers, Google, Google I/O

Three questions for Google at I/O

On Wednesday this week, Google kicks of its developer event, Google I/O, completing the trifecta of major developer events with Microsoft’s Build and Apple’s WWDC. These events set the stage for at least the next year for these companies, and in some cases far more. And though they’re targeted at developers, they often tell us a great deal about the companies’ outlook and strategy beyond just those who write for their various platforms. As such, I thought it would be useful to outline three big questions for Google to answer at I/O later this week, and what the answers might mean. I’ll be at I/O for the keynote Wednesday morning at least, and I’ll be sharing my thoughts during the event on Twitter, and afterwards here and at Techpinions.

Which way will the pendulum swing between open and controlled?

Android has famously been described since its release at Google as an open operating system, and is literally an open source operating system at least as far as the AOSP version is concerned. But Google has been steadily chipping away at this openness, by preventing licensees of the Google Mobile Services package from also selling forked versions of Android, by allegedly putting pressure on Samsung to tone down its UI customizations, and by abstracting more of the core features of Android into standalone apps. At the same time, it’s acquired Nest (which is itself now acquiring Dropcam), has developed Google Glass and self-driving cars and released the Chromecast dongle for TVs. All of these products combined Google-owned hardware with Google-owned software, a departure from the platform approach it has taken with Android. Is this new, more controlled approach the shape of things to come, and the way we should think about Google’s approach to the markets it will enter in the coming years, or are they anomalous? Will Google the platform and software company become Google the hardware company, even as it rids itself of by far its biggest hardware unit in the form of Motorola?

How does Google think about integration between its platforms?

Both Microsoft and Apple showcased their approaches to cross-device and cross-platform integration at their respective developer events, and they’re quite different, as I’ve talked about here previously. Both of those companies have two separate operating systems, and they’ve talked about how they bring those together for end users. Microsoft has focused more on a common user interface at the end user layer, and a common kernel and tools at the developer layer, while Apple has focused on a common and integrated user experience and now a common language. With two operating systems of its own in the form of Chrome OS and Android, Google needs to tell the story of how these come together for both users and developers. So far, Google’s integration has been largely focused on its services, which operate not just on any of Google’s platforms but on third-party platforms such as iOS and Windows as well. But as its two major competitors focus on deeper integration between their platforms, Google’s two platforms feel as far apart as they ever have. Will putting them both under one leader in the form of Sundar Pichai change things? What will we see at I/O that demonstrates that Google understands the need to rationalize these two operating systems in some form?

How will Google respond to the privacy gauntlet thrown down by Apple?

At WWDC, Apple focused more than it ever has on its approach to security and privacy, with several explicit digs at Google in the process. HealthKit, HomeKit, iOS and its sandboxing approach, preserved even as Apple adds Extensibility – in all these announcements, Apple reiterated its commitment to securing its users’ data and protecting them from intrusions from both malicious actors and over-zealous marketers. Google has always pushed the boundaries in terms of privacy and security, both policing Android less than Apple polices iOS from an apps perspective and itself intruding ever more on users’ privacy. With the Nest acquisition (and now the Dropcam acquisition) Google has been forced to make clear statements about the separation between these units and Google itself from a data perspective. DuckDuckGo continues to grow rapidly if at a very small scale as an alternative to Google in the search engine world. Reverberations from the Snowden revelations continue to be felt. Samsung continues to build its own enterprise security and device management capabilities on top of Android. How will Google respond to all this? How will it demonstrate that it is creating not only secure platforms but platforms and services which respect user privacy?

Beyond product and feature announcements

I think we’ll see explicit or implicit answers to all these questions at I/O, and those answers will signal broader strategic shifts from Google which will be felt for years to come. Yes, it will make individual product and feature announcements including – in all likelihood – a new version of Android, the first Android Wear products and others. But it’s these big strategic choices that will have far more impact over the long term.

Apple, Apple Retail, Beats, Developer events, Distribution, Emerging markets, HealthKit, HomeKit, Mature markets, Retail, Smart home, WWDC, WWDC 2014

Apple is doubling down on mature markets

As we gear up for Google I/O next week, and imagine what we might see from Google there, I wanted to have one last look at Apple’s WWDC, from a slight different perspective. One of the thoughts about WWDC that’s taken a while to percolate for me is that WWDC was a good sign that, from a product perspective at least, Apple is doubling down on mature, developed markets, rather than joining the land rush in emerging markets.

HomeKit and HealthKit are about solving first-world problems

I wrote about HealthKit and HomeKit in a couple of previous pieces here and on Techpinions. I think they’re both much-needed solutions to real problems in the health and fitness and home automation categories. But these are in some ways the very definition of first world problems. Trying to get your smart lock, your smart lightbulb and your smart thermostat to talk to each other is a challenge experienced only by people who can afford to buy the overpriced products on offer in these markets.

HealthKit also comes into its own in part when tying together several different fitness tracking devices, which is another first-world phenomenon. There is, though, another element to HealthKit, which is about access to medical data from various healthcare providers. But again, this is something of a mature-market issue. A recent data set from Opera Mediaworks highlighted the disconnect between mature and emerging markets when it comes to searching for health related information on mobile devices:

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Apple, Big picture, Developer events, iMessage, Messaging, Whole company analysis, WWDC, WWDC 2014

What “winning” means for Apple

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I posted a tweet yesterday that seemed to hit a nerve with people, and so I thought I’d expand on my thinking a bit here. What I actually posted was two related tweets, though it was the second that seemed to resonate – the first was merely context:

There were at least two articles that prompted my tweet, but the main one was this one from Ellis Hamburger at the Verge. Both took a tack that I felt fundamentally misunderstood what Apple does and how it does it, but there was one particular section of piece on the Verge that sums up the mentality here very well, so I’ll use that as the jumping off point:

But today, communications are a commodity, and it’s hard (if not impossible) to survive in the long-run as an app that only works on one platform. A dozen messaging apps are sweeping the globe, and all of them work whether you have an iPhone, Android, Mac, or PC. Apple’s Messages app, and the iMessage platform therein, only work if your friends and family use Apple products. In the United States, where iPhone market share is highest of almost any country, iMessage’s thin ice is harder to perceive. The United States is one of the only countries where no one messaging app reigns king, but elsewhere markets are dominated by one messaging app or another, all of which have similar features and work on all platforms.

A single-platform messaging app cannot win. Despite its tasteful new feature additions, however derivative they may be, Apple is playing on borrowed time. If Apple is determined to stay single-platform, it’s going to take more than new features to save its messaging ambitions.

To suggest that Apple is trying to “win” in the messaging wars is equivalent to suggesting that iTunes was an attempt to “win” in the music-playing software wars. Neither is the case. The first thing to understand about Apple is that it’s motivated first and foremost by creating the best possible experience on Apple devices. This imperative drove Steve Jobs to the extent that he made poor business decisions early on in his time at Apple, ultimately leading to his ouster. He was so fixated with this objective that he lost sight of others and ultimately of what it would take to keep Apple in business as a public company, a lesson he learned the hard way and ultimately brought back to Apple when he returned. But that has always been the fundamental motivation for Apple’s senior leaders above all else.

That motivation leads to one of the other defining characteristics of Apple as a company: the tight integration of hardware, software and services. Apple has never been about creating cross-platform services. To those of you who may wish to point out that Apple has long had iTunes on Windows, I direct you to this quote from Walter Isaacson’s 2011 book on Steve Jobs:

We put iTunes on Windows in order to sell more iPods. But I don’t see an advantage of putting our music app on Android, except to make Android users happy. And I don’t want to make Android users happy.

Apple’s only significant cross-platform move was still a move to make Apple devices more compelling – the simple fact is that an iPod was not a standalone device, and it needed iTunes to be at all useful. Given the Mac’s very low share of the global PC market, releasing iTunes for Windows was an obvious strategic imperative. But it was done with one objective in mind – making the iPod a compelling device for a larger number of users, and yes, selling more iPods as a result.

What both the pieces I linked to above ignore is that everything Apple does is part of an ecosystem, and that’s exactly why people buy its products. Ever since the iPod and iTunes launched, Apple has been in the business of connecting its devices together in a way that adds value to each of them. The iPod added value to the Mac by providing a portable music player for your iTunes music, and iTunes on the Mac added value to the iPod by providing the conduit through which you obtained music to put on your device. When Apple released iTunes, it wasn’t competing in the music-playing software market anymore than iMessage is Apple’s attempt to compete in the messaging market. Both products were software Apple developed to add more value to its hardware products, and should not be seen as products in their own right.

When the whole rationale for Apple’s software is to add value to its hardware products, the idea of providing cross-platform software or services becomes inimical. To the extent that Apple software or services are available on non-Apple devices, they cease to provide meaningful differentiation for Apple products. By contrast, making Apple-exclusive software and services available on various different Apple hardware products adds significant value, and providing tighter integration between those devices through software and services adds even more. Hence the focus on these things at WWDC on Monday. To suggest that Apple needs to make its Messages product (or any other product) cross-platform in order to succeed is to get things exactly backwards – Apple doesn’t make hardware to be successful in messaging; it makes a messaging product to be successful in hardware.

This makes its Beats acquisition particularly interesting, since the Beats music streaming service is cross-platform today. But I suspect that the product we eventually see from Apple which integrates Beats’ streaming and curation technology will go back to being Apple-only. If there’s any strategic rationale to Apple spending so much money to stay at the forefront of the music business, it’s to make the iPhone the best device for music, and not to create a broad-based music subscription service.

All of this is part of a broader trend in the consumer technology space, which is that the most successful companies are competing in a different way, by combining hardware, software, content, communications (and in some cases connectivity) in integrated ways which create compelling end-to-end experiences for consumers. I see the same flawed logic among people criticizing Amazon’s entry to the smartphone market on the basis that no-one makes money in smartphones. If Amazon is entering the smartphone market, it’s not to make money on smartphones, but to drive buyers to spend more money with Amazon as a whole, across digital content and e-commerce. Amazon and Apple each have a core business that makes the bulk of their money, and their entry into adjacent spaces is intended to reinforce the core business, often at break-even or even negative margins. Google is the archetype of this model, providing many services for free, all of them funded by advertising and especially search advertising. It provides those services not out of the kindness of its heart but in order to increase the appeal of the Google ecosystem and to gather data that helps with its other businesses.

Apple isn’t fighting the messaging war. To the extent it’s fighting a war at all, it’s fighting an ecosystem war, and so far it’s winning. Is Apple’s tightly-integrated model the only way to be successful in the consumer technology market? Not at all, though it certainly seems to be the way to generate the best margins. There’s always going to be room and demand for other models too, and both Microsoft and Google have benefited greatly in market share terms from taking a less integrated approach. But to imply that Apple’s approach is ultimately doomed is to ignore what’s made it so successful over the past several decades, and the model it needs to continue to pursue to remain successful.

Apple, Apple TV, Developer events, Developers, fragmentation, Google, HealthKit, HomeKit, iOS, iOS 8, iWatch, Microsoft, OS X, Smart home, Smartwatches, Wearables, WWDC, WWDC 2014, Yosemite

Apple resurgent – thoughts on WWDC

Today’s WWDC keynote was a sign of a renewed swagger on the part of Apple, whose executives seemed to relish the deluge of new product announcements they unleashed on developers and on their customers. In the process Apple established or strengthened its competitive positioning against two major foes – Microsoft and Google – while opening itself up in unparalleled ways to developers. Today’s announcements may come to be seen in the same way as Steve Jobs’ original launch of Mac OS X, in that it lays the groundwork in several areas for years of future Apple products.

The demotion of Google continues

Two years ago at WWDC, Apple removed erstwhile close partner Google from the iPhone in two significant areas: as the backend provider for the Maps app, and in the form of the pre-installed YouTube app. But Google’s last major bastion on iOS is its position as the default search engine in Safari, and it’s much harder to remove there. In the sense of typing a query into a search box or address bar in a browser, hitting enter and being presented with a screen of blue links, Google is unrivaled, and Apple knows that. But it has slowly been inserting itself between the user and that search box over the last couple of years, and today’s keynote provided further evidence of Apple’s pre-empting of the Google search on both iOS and OS X devices.

Apple’s more subtle disruption of the user-Google relationship began with the launch of Siri, which began to address some users’ queries without an explicit search, and which uses Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha and Bing, but not Google, as underlying search providers. And it has continued since then, as more third party services have been layered into Siri, pre-empting the Google search for movie listings, restaurant reservations and sports scores. Today’s keynote added Spotlight search to the list of places where users will now find answers to their queries without the classic search box experience, thus further inserting Apple between users and Google.

This is potentially significant for Google, for which the US continues to be easily its single biggest and most lucrative market, and for which mobile is increasingly important. To the extent that iPhone users, which make over 40% of US smartphone users, start using Apple and its tightly integrated third party services instead of Google, for search, that’s pretty bad news. That isn’t, of course, why Apple is taking these steps, but it’s an unpleasant side effect for Google. And a great way for Apple to participate in the search business without having to match Google in the page-of-blue-links business.

A device for every need, not one device for every need

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