Google Slams Apple Over iPhone Ad Ban 562
crimeandpunishment writes "This real-life clash of the titans could be much more interesting than the movie. Today Google fired the latest volley in its war of words with Apple over mobile advertising. In a blog posting, the head of Google's mobile ad service, Admob, had harsh words for Apple's new restrictions concerning the iPhone and iPad ... calling them a threat to competition. There's a lot of money at stake ... the US mobile ad market, which is about $600 million, is expected to more than double by 2013."
Only the Analytics are banned (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Are they...surprised? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Only the Analytics are banned (Score:2, Informative)
Not having used iOS 4, I can't really say if this is a good thing or a bad thing overall, but I do like knowing that there are restrictions in place on who gets to handle what info about me.
Personally, I have location awareness turned off so this doesn't really apply much to me, but the idea is the same.
This isn't a monopoly move either, Apple isn't forcing anything on anyone outside their own platform to do anything. Apple is doing the same thing cable and satellite providers have been doing all along. . . picking and choosing who gets to advertise where and how.
Re:Cry me a river (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh, Google (Score:3, Informative)
The version of Chrome you link to is a BETA release.
If you don't like crashing, why not use the release version [google.com]?
Re:Only the Analytics are banned (Score:3, Informative)
They are allowed to count click throughs. They just aren't allowed to pass any information about the user/device/location, that's all.
Re:So this is like cable TV? (Score:4, Informative)
This will date me, but I remember when cable TV came out, two advantages detailed:
1: No antennas to worry about.
2: You pay for the service, and not advertising, thus no ads.
Then the ads came between shows. Not much longer, people sat through the same time of ads on cable as they do on OTA TV.
Re:And thus there was Android (Score:3, Informative)
Re:When is a monopoly not a monopoly? (Score:3, Informative)
I missed the part where 28% is a monopoly. Explain that to me again.
You also apparently missed the part where GP specifically said it's not a monopoly, he was just indicating that the figure is actually much higher than the "less than 10%" quoted above.
Re:When is a monopoly not a monopoly? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:When is a monopoly not a monopoly? (Score:5, Informative)
First, this is Jobs (reality distortion fields envelop those emanating them), so no, they don't have 28%. Not even close. What do the other manufacturers claim they have? RIM is still number one. Android is growing much faster than Apple is, or did.
Second, they don't have a monopoly. Not even close.
Third, this is restraint of trade and illegal.
Android manufacturers need to buck up in a hurry. (Score:2, Informative)
The iphone is dangerous near monopoly status.
And don't tell me to look at market share, RIM and Nokia are both running on inertia, it's only a matter of time before they fall.
The iphone platform is becoming the "standard" for mobile apps, much like Windows is on the desktop.
I for one do not want a repeat of Windows, especially not with Apple.
Those bastards are worse than Microsoft when it come to choice.
Living under the dictatorship of Steve Jobs, where you can't have something unless the Führer approves, would suck balls.
Fortunately things like the HTC phones and the new Samsung Galaxy S gives me a tad bit of hope.
Still they need to step it up a notch.
Re:When is a monopoly not a monopoly? (Score:3, Informative)
It's not a monopoly when, not only do they not have a controlling share of the market, they also don't have the largest share of the market. In legal terms, antitrust starts to apply when you have enough of a market share to act as if you had a monopoly (e.g. you can raise prices arbitrarily).
When you have a minority of the market, you can do whatever you want with your closed platform, because it won't (seriously) distort the market. Apple could, for example, require you to buy a beret and turtleneck with your iPhone, and that would be completely legal.
Of course, just because something is legal doesn't mean that you're not an asshat for doing it. I can walk up to you in the street and call you an idiot, but I suspect that neither of us would endorse or condone that kind of behaviour just because it happens not to be illegal.
Re:WebKit is based of of the KHTML (Score:5, Informative)
I think you'll find if you look at the underlying codebase that the lion's share of development was still done as KHTML
Spoken like someone who has never looked at the code. If you exclude:
then yes, most of it was done as part of KHTML. If you look at KHTML now, you'll see a lot of changes back-ported from WebKit. If you compare WebKit now to KHTML in 2002 (when WebKit was forked), you won't see very much common code at all. When WebKit was forked, KHTML was about 140KLoC. According to Ohloh.net, WebKit now is 715K lines of C++, 75K lines of ObjC, 34K lines of C, and a lot of various other things. Even if Apple had retained 100% of the KHTML code, it would now account for 10% of the total codebase. In reality, large chunks have been rewritten (KJS, for example), so it's now less than 5%.
Re:And thus there was Android (Score:3, Informative)
"Then they decided they wanted a piece of the pie instead of depending on Apple"
Google bought Android in July, 2005. Apple announced the iPhone in January, 2007.
You're saying they launched their own platform as a reaction to the iPhone?
Re:When is a monopoly not a monopoly? (Score:3, Informative)
I missed the part where 28% is a monopoly. Explain that to me again.
You also missed the part where you actually read the GPs post before posting your own snarky reply. from GP post
Sure, that's still not really a monopoly