Another View On The Google Voice/iPhone Fracas
The iPhoneblog has an interesting take over the brouhaha regarding whether or not Google Voice will be allowed on the iPhone.
I made this analogy yesterday and I’m sticking by it — IBM licensing DOS for the PC killed IBM and gave birth to Microsoft. Google has a near-monopoly on search-based advertising, the cash cow of the internet, and they’re moving into all manner of services, now including software and mobile and desktop OS. They’re becoming so directly competitive with Apple that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has left Apple’s board of directors.
Apple worrying that one of their biggest, best funded, best forwardly positioned competitors is taking over the iPhone to a degree that they, rather than Apple, control the device?
Yeah, that’s totally believable.
Do we think for one moment that, if instead of licensing ActiveSync to work in Mail, Calendar, and Contacts, Microsoft had wanted to put a Mobile Outlook app on the iPhone to handle all that separately, Apple still would have gone forward with it?
I’m an unabashed supporter of Google Voice (look at my contact page, if you don’t believe me); transcribed voicemails are a sufficient killer app all by itself, even without the one-number-to-rule-them-all aspect of things. Rene’s comments are pretty insightful on the situation…
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