Google is also a business that requires fewer individuals. You can have engineering teams of 20-30 people supporting major development projects. So, why don’t more companies do something similar? Why have otherwise capable companies like Microsoft and Apple largely failed in the realm of web applications? It is likely a question of leadership. The people who run Microsoft and Apple are not web natives. They do not love and believe in the web the way Google loves the web.

So, if Apple wants to stay relevant they need to get Google on the defensive. To do so, they need to take on search and a good entry into search would be to acquire Twitter and / or Facebook. Take search and make it truly social. Take search and personalize it. This is something Apple might be successful with.

Multiple sources at Google tell us that in informal discussions with Apple over the last few months Apple expressed dismay at the number of core iPhone apps that are powered by Google. Search, maps, YouTube, and other key popular apps are powered by Google. Other than the browser, Apple has little else to call its own other than the core phone, contacts and calendar features. The Google Voice App takes things one step further, by giving users an incentive to abandon their iPhone phone number and use their Google Voice phone number instead (transcription of voicemails is reason enough alone). Apple was afraid, say our sources, that Google was gaining too much power on the iPhone, and that’s why they rejected the application. #

Trying to just introduce something anti-competitive like arbitrary price controls will not work, for a few reasons.

For one, the cost of distribution is zero. The cost for entering the application market is effectively zero. You can market your application at any price you wish. So, if you cannot demonstrate effective value for your price, that is your responsibility. No consumer owes you a certain price, especially with relation to digital goods for which there is no necessary ongoing cost following development.

For another, even though many people now have iPhones, most of the ones I know rarely use any special apps. They seem to spend most of their time texting or web browsing. I rarely encounter anyone who uses any other third party apps with any regularity. So, my impression is the potential application market is actually deceptively small and very casual. No one really cares that much to begin with and the more apps produced, the less people will care.

Thirdly, the best apps for mobile devices tend to be free and tend to tie into larger web services. For example, the Pandora mobile app for Blackberry and iPhone is amazing. I would have paid $10 for it. Luckily, Pandora wants me as a user, so they throw it in for free. So, when I consider all the mobile apps I use with any regularity, the bulk of them are provided for free by companies I already use: Google Voice, Google Maps with Google Latitude, Google Talk, Pandora, Facebook, and the Amazon mobile app. The only app I use other than this is TwitterBerry, which is free. I would pay for a mobile app, but the fact is most of them are not all that compelling.

Obviously, a lot of companies are making money developing for the iPhone. But, there is a gold rush phenomenon. The first companies to capitalize on it will make the bulk of the revenues. Then it will just flatten out, as users take mobile applications for granted as much as they do most websites where it rarely occurs to them to pay for anything. That’s not their problem.

What do you think?

With the acquisition of Lexcycle, the producer of the iPhone ebook app Stanza, Amazon is consolidating its lead in ebooks. They are also signaling that it’s less about the device you use to read ebooks and more about distribution. Distribution is where the real profits lie. People buy a Kindle once, but they may purchase thousands of dollars worth of ebooks and e-periodicalsover their lifespan as a consumer. This is where Amazon wants to be. Not in making hardware, but in selling digital goods and controlling a large portion of the marketplace. The only reason Amazon really needed the Kindle was to create the marketplace. Once people are accustomed to buying their ebooks from Amazon, the device becomes irrelevant.

So, it is natural that Amazon wants to insert itself wherever people are actually reading. Although Amazon may want people to read on a Kindle, if they’re reading on their iPhones they will want to be in front of them there, too.

Amazon is also very aware of how successfully Apple cornered the market on digital music early on with iTunes. It was not until the record labels relented and agreed to sell music in open formats such as MP3 that other competitors such as Amazon were able to emerge to compete with iTunes. If Amazon can dominate ebooks as they have ecommerce in general, they will be in a similar position.

As an aside:

With the success of Amazon’s MP3 store, both iTunes and Amazon have raised their prices, which probably pleases the record industry. In this sense, competition can be bad for consumers and for merchants but better for content creators as they can play merchants off against one another.

While Amazon would prefer to sell digital music rather than not, they would most prefer to be the biggest seller of digital music. By extending their lead in ebooks, they are building their leverage with publishers and a wall against competition. Ultimately, this may be a good thing for consumers as Amazon will seek to sell as much as they can.

One thing I noticed is that if you edit the timestamp to schedule a post publishing at a later date, WordPress still appears to send out a ping when you actually hit “Publish” rather than when the post is scheduled for publishing. I noticed this because Google was trying to hit posts that had not yet been published, but that had been scheduled, which was generating 404 errors. 404 errors are not search engine friendly, so I would consider this a fairly egregious bug. Since you are sending out pings, which include URL’s containing the words included in your post stub this could be something of a security hole in the sense that you might divulge time-sensitive information before it’s intended for release.

I tried reporting the bug to WordPress, but could not log in with my WordPress.org credentials. Curses.