CNN

by Hideki Fran­cis Onda
申し訳ない、英文だけです。日本語で書くと意味が変わるのでご了承ください。Try Google Translate.

THE WAR for ulti­mate con­trol of a daily device and how infor­ma­tion is com­mu­ni­cated, searched, adver­tised, bought, sold, shared, posted, mined and stored will reach it’s new HIGHs this year. Guaranteed.

Look at all the news about the iSlate, Google’s Android phone and how the two com­pa­nies are buy­ing com­pa­nies that relate to cloud com­put­ing. Admob, Quat­tro, Lala on and on and more to come.

Google’s core busi­ness is sell­ing ads based on it’s search and cat­e­go­rize engines, but in recent years has found way to uti­lize this tech­nol­ogy in mul­ti­ple of dif­fer­ent ways. How­ever it is also in the busi­ness of mak­ing legacy tele­com meth­ods and infra­struc­ture obso­lete. Google wants to tag the whole world’s pop­u­la­tion with a data­base of the indi­vid­u­als likes and hates and will use this to direct mar­ket prod­ucts to sell, and offer by itself every tool needed to make this hap­pen. It is try­ing to bring back 1 num­ber per indi­vid­ual so you can­not escape your old girl­friend or gov­ern­ment tax chase down. There is of course so much merit in effi­ciency to this, as Google can take over country’s entire sta­tis­ti­cal work. You are assigned one G-Number when you are born. Sounds Orwellian?  Sure, this will hap­pen for sure because with­out it we can­not over­come our cur­rent bot­tle­neck of tax, census, med­ical, insur­ance issues. Google wants to be there when it hap­pens. Like the project Google played a big part in, the Human Genome Project, with Google it made the map­ping of the whole DNA pos­si­ble. Some esti­mate that with­out Google, it would have taken 20 or more years. Google is and has been allowed to play such a major role due to it’s com­pany cul­ture of Don’t be EVIL, a free pass to intrude, see and gather infor­ma­tion, but to have the high­est moral­ity and secu­rity while doing it.

Apple’s core busi­ness is and was sell­ing devices with it’s own oper­at­ing sys­tems to com­pute, share and com­mu­ni­cate.  It has cre­ated a dom­i­neer­ing ecosys­tem of how peo­ple man­age, lis­ten, buy and share music. It has been try­ing to do the same with mov­ing pic­tures. It has suc­ceeded in grab­bing a siz­able share of the tele­com mar­ket as a tool sup­plier, but now fears Google may have a bet­ter edge as hard­ware becomes unim­por­tant and the RELATIONSHIP of DATA becomes the GOLDEN EGG of the con­nected future. There­fore it vir­tu­ally has no choice but to enter the SEARCH offer­ing by itself or with Microsoft for the time being with con­tin­ued devel­op­ment of it’s own SEARCH engine and the open­ing of the NC datacenter.

Unless one can con­tribute to rel­e­vance in adding worth­while data for him­self, fam­ily and oth­ers to uti­lize, the gad­get and infra­struc­ture becomes just another ASK.COM, who as ASK JEEVES once could have con­quered the internet.

In Jan­u­ary this year, the web, news and blogs are filled with arti­cles about Google’s newest NEXUS ONE phone and Apple’s tablet device. Google’s phone did not make the big splash it intended, but the main point of this exer­cise was that Google was pre­pared to bypass the tele­coms and sell it’s hard­ware prod­uct directly via Google check­out, as more and more tele­cos offer blank slate data usage plans for any smart­phone. Google and Apple are turn­ing once pow­er­ful car­ri­ers to a “only the cheap­est and sta­ble ser­vice sur­vive”, although the tele­cos are pow­er­ful enough to bite back if it starts to really under­stand and react to what is hap­pen­ing and build a bet­ter than Google or Apple offer­ing, but very unlikely.

As I have been involved in the Apple busi­ness for the past 25 years, and worked at Apple as a Sales Direc­tor, I can tell you with con­fi­dence the school of though Steve and Co has was and is always Dom­i­nate or leave the seg­ment to oth­ers.  The path of what the mar­ket sees as tech tool for Dig­i­tal Utopia  now seems to have nar­rowed enough on where future com­put­ing and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions is going, Apple MUST develop it’s own SEARCH and AD and MINING offer­ings. It can­not sur­vive Google with­out it.

Recent rum­blings and con­trol­lably leaked news sug­gest that Apple will use Bling, Microsoft’s search engine until it can get it’s own run­ning. You should expect to see Apple job posts titled “Inter­net crawlers, bots and search engine opti­miza­tion specialist” .

Build­ing a SEARCH engine may not be so dif­fi­cult com­pared to the early days of Google, and Apple may have already have some idea on what kind of tech­nol­ogy to employ here. There is no need to re-map what has been mapped, the logic may go. It is impor­tant HOW you map things and WHERE they are pre­sented and CONSUMED.

Apple has been one of the smartest com­pany acquir­ing for noth­ing com­pa­nies that had done ground work in par­tic­u­lar fields. Apple may not have to dish out so much man hours and cash to make search hap­pen. It may sim­ply STUMBLE upon it, as more and more rel­e­vance shift to SNS and GEO TAGGING and MICRO BLOGGING.

So all the talk about slate and tablets from Google and Apple  have no rel­e­vance about who will monop­o­lize the new data and tool mar­ket. It is all in the clouds and who owns the slices of method­ol­ogy and functions.

This is a devel­op­ing story with nei­ther Apple of Google not sure which way to attack, defend and coun­ter­at­tack. It is such a new era that the play­ers them­selves do not know the out­come of the actions.

Take for exam­ple the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion of Google and China. Google had been denied the scan­ning and elec­tri­fi­ca­tion of Chi­nese lit­er­a­ture by the gov­ern­ment. Google com­plained and a few days later the attack­hap­pened. Steve Jobs has been busy meet­ing pub­lish­ers for a slice to sell books online for the com­ing tablet.

So those who con­trol the con­tent wins. Con­tent is never free. Peo­ple who cre­ate con­tent must get paid. Google’s approach of DONT BE EVIL and that shar­ing of the cul­ture is good for the planet VS Apple’s “yes, we will sell your book at 1.99 and pay you 30%” dif­fer on basic grounds but both are try­ing to cor­ner the same con­tent offer­ing. although how it is used and sold is com­pletely different.

I am quite amazed that the 2 com­pa­nies did not expect this to hap­pen so soon. Twit­ter and Face­book and API’s changed all of this. 2010 will be a very very impor­tant year for these reasons.