Google Phone Could Drive Apple Into Allegiance With Microsoft

rsmiller510 writes "A BusinessWeek report suggests that the Nexus One release marks the latest volley in an escalating war between Google and Apple, one that could force Apple into working more closely with Microsoft. 'When companies start to imitate one another, it's usually either an extreme case of flattery—or war. In the case of Google and Apple, it's both. Separated by a mere 10 miles in Silicon Valley, the two have been on famously good terms for almost a decade. ... Now the companies have entered a new, more adversarial phase. With Nexus One, Google, which had been content to power multiple phonemakers' devices with Android, enters the hardware game, becoming a direct threat to the iPhone. With its Quattro purchase, Apple aims to create completely new kinds of mobile ads, say three sources familiar with Apple's thinking. The goal isn't so much to compete with Google in search as to make search on mobile phones obsolete. ... Some analysts believe the Apple-Google battle is likely to get much rougher in the months ahead. Ovum's Yarmis thinks Apple may soon decide to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices, primarily to cut Google off from mobile data that could be used to improve its advertising and Android technology. Jobs might cut a deal with—gasp!—Microsoft to make Bing Apple's engine of choice, or even launch its own search engine, Yarmis says."

Re:Bing on an Apple product?

[janek78]

It does do that. For example googling for "Slashdot" returns a link that on mouse over show as "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot" in the status bar, but in fact is http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&ved=0CBkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSlashdot&rct=j&q=slashdot&ei=-FJTS6eACaKmnQOhmKCTCg&usg=AFQjCNEZ2izp-RcQ2rEPNchi1qS-mPpnRA [google.com]

It does this both logged in and logged out.

Re:This makes perfect sense

[nine-times]

Grudge? Microsoft essentially saved Apple by loaning it much needed $$$.

Not exactly a loan. Microsoft bought a bunch of Apple stock. Common wisdom at the time was that Microsoft needed to prop up some kind of paper tiger competitor to avoid further anti-trust restrictions.

But anyway that was after Jobs left and before he returned. When Apple started becoming successful again, Microsoft dropped Exchange support from their MacOS office suite and stopped developing IE. It doesn't seem like a friendly relationship. Apple still wants Microsoft Office for OSX for marketing purposes, and they want ActiveSync licenses for their iPhones. I don't see the relationship getting much closer than that.

Re:Bing on an Apple product?

[nine-times]

Not for me. My status bar shows the correct link, and when I right click and ask to copy the link, the correct link goes to my clipboard. Could it be a browser thing? What browser are you using?

Re:Bing on an Apple product?

[linumax]

Seems like it is browser dependent. On Firefox I get a modified URL in clipboard, but in Chrome, Safari and Opera the actual URL.

Re:This makes perfect sense

[TheRaven64]

I take it you don't remember AltaVista? It existed for the sole purpose of advertising Alphas. Most people didn't care, or even know, that it ran on Alphas, but whenever the DEC sales people went to corporate customers to explain how well their kit scaled they had an example that they could easily point to. No one cares about Google's custom Linux because Google isn't selling it. People would care about a search engine running on XServes with OS X because it would be a large-scale server deployment that Apple sales reps could point to.

Re:Bing on an Apple product?

[TheRaven64]

I'm betting that you have JavaScript disabled. For me, the link looks like this:

<a href="http://slashdot.org/" class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','1','','0CAkQFjAA')"><em>Slashdot</em> - News for nerds, stuff that matters</a>

When you click on it, you actually go to the redirector, which counts the click (to rank things people click on higher) and then bounces you to the right place. I think that the href in the link loads pointing to the redirector and then the JavaScript rewrites it to point to the real site so that the status bar and copy work.

Re:Bing on an Apple product?

[Art3x]

The actual link --- the actual href attribute of the HTML <a> tag --- is http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]. In Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, if you Copy shortcut, it copies as http://slashdot.org. But Firefox is sniffing a little further and sees that a JavaScript event handler is attached to each link that redirects them. I'm sure that this extra sniffing by Firefox is not what Google intended. I think Google wanted you get the actual link if needed, else they would not have gone through the trouble of doing the redirects in JavaScript. I also think that this further sniffing might be a new feature in Firefox, because Google has always done their links this way (HTML has real link, JavaScript adds the redirect).

Re:This makes perfect sense

[harlows_monkeys]

Grudge? Microsoft essentially saved Apple by loaning it much needed $$$

First, there was no loan. Microsoft bought $150 million of non-voting Apple stock.

Second, Apple had around $4 billion in cash or cash-equivalents at the time. They didn't need the money from selling that stock to Microsoft.

The purpose of the transaction was not to give money to Apple, but rather to show that Microsoft was serious about supporting Apple (particularly by continuing to develop and sell Office Mac) for the next few years.

Re:Bing on an Apple product?

[Petrushka]

Addendum: if it's any comfort, Bing and Ask do exactly the same: in Bing search results, the code for a link to Slashdot is:

<a href="http://slashdot.org/index.pl" onmousedown="return si_T('&ID=SERP,140.1')"><strong>Slashdot</strong>: News for nerds, stuff that matters</a>

In Ask it's:

<a id="r0_t" href="http://slashdot.org/" onmousedown="return fp(this,{en:'te',io:'0',b:'a001',tp:'d',ec:'1',ex:'tsrc%3Dvnru'},'false',0)" class="L4" target="_blank" ><b>Slashdot</b> Stories (10)</a>

Yahoo and AltaVista are more obvious because they change the URL. Google, Bing, and Ask, track every click too; they're just better at hiding it.