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21 Jan 2010

Apple Microsoft Google Logos Let’s take a trip back in time. The year is 1994, and two tech giants are going to war over copyright. They are Microsoft and Apple, and they are fighting over a copyright claim by Apple over Microsoft and HP’s use of graphical user interface elements from the Macintosh OS. The resulting court case, Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation, ended with a ruling in Microsoft’s favor, mostly due to a contractual license agreement between the two.

The matter was never fully settled by the case though. Instead, negotiations that took place several years later resulted in the two companies agreeing to make Internet Explorer Mac’s default browser. Microsoft also agreed to keep developing Office for the Mac. Most importantly though, Microsoft invested $150 million into Apple to keep it afloat.

This series of events, which happened while Steve Jobs was being reinstated as the CEO of Apple, set the stage for what is happening today between Microsoft, Apple, and Google. While Microsoft and Apple are still bitter rivals, several recent events have inadvertently brought them closer together in order to fight their common enemy: Google.

The phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” comes to mind. Let’s explore how we got to this tipping point.

Android: Google Enters Apple’s Turf

When Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s Board of Directors in 2006, the move made perfect sense. Here’s what Apple said about Eric in its original announcement:

“Eric’s 20 years of experience as an Internet strategist, entrepreneur and technologist give him a well-seasoned perspective which perfectly complements Google’s needs as a young and rapidly growing company with a unique corporate culture.”

At that time, Google wasn’t in mobile, hardware, operating systems, or browsers. Now Google is directly competing with Apple through the Nexus One, Google Chrome, Chrome OS, and even possibly in the tablet computer space.

It all started with Android, though. Back in August 2007, details began to leak about Google building a mobile OS or even a GPhone. It turned out to be Android, the open-source mobile OS that is now the fastest growing smartphone OS on the market.

At first, Android didn’t pose much of a threat, but as more phones utilized the software, the relationship between Google and Apple became very uncomfortable. Eric Schmidt sat out board meetings discussing the iPhone due to conflict of interest, but the relationship only eroded from there.

Watershed Moment: Eric Schmidt Resigns from Apple’s Board

Tensions between the two companies grew worse after Apple rejected Google Voice as an app on the iPhone.

The resulting FCC inquiry, along with an FTC investigation and the announcement of Google Chrome OS were just too much. On August 3rd, 2009, Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s Board of Directors.

In retrospect, this was the moment when Apple, Google, and the rest of the world realized that the two companies could no longer be allies. Google’s expanding interest outside of search was pouring over into Apple’s domain on multiple fronts. With the search giant free of its Apple association, it could go all-out on its agenda to bring more people onto the web for longer (read the Google Revenue Equation to learn why).

The culmination of the breaking of the Google-Apple alliance? It was the release of the Nexus One, a direct competitor to Apple’s lucrative iPhone.

Recent Events: Apple and Microsoft Talk Bing

Yesterday we learned that Apple and Microsoft are in talks to make Bing the default search engine for the iPhone. While we’ve heard this rumor before, the talk seems to be heating up. Most of our readers expressed their dismay or shock over the potential deal, some questioning why Apple would ever team up with Microsoft over Google.

Really though, the deal makes perfect sense, given the new competitive landscape. Earlier today, Jim Goldman at CNBC provided some interesting new information on the dynamics of the Apple-Google-Microsoft relationship. According to his source, Steve Jobs hates Eric Schmidt (it wouldn’t surprise us) and Microsoft is offering a bigger cut of iPhone search revenues than Google.

While Microsoft and Apple’s relationship grew cold after the Redmond, WA company bailed Apple Computer out, it never vanished. Moreover, Steve knows that he can work with Microsoft, especially if it helps Microsoft hurt Google.

Android has become the de-facto alternative to the iPhone OS, and the Nexus One is closest thing yet to a smartphone that can stand up to the iPhone’s dominance. While Microsoft and Apple are still in competition over Mac vs. PC, Apple clearly believes that its future isn’t just in computers, but in other Internet devices such as the iPhone and the fabled Apple Tablet. Microsoft poses far less of a threat in these areas than Google does.

It’s time to call it: Google is now Apple’s greatest enemy. Soon Google will be entering its OS turf with Chrome OS. Apple increasingly sees Google as a major competitor over the next few years. While the company Steve built doesn’t particularly like Microsoft, it knows that it has to work with the lesser of two evils in order to succeed.

Say hello to the new dynamic. It’s Apple + Microsoft vs. Google. May the new battle begin.

Reviews: Android, Bing, Google

Tags: apple, bing, business news, Column, Google, google search, iphone, microsoft, Opinion, social media, trending

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How Do You Get Breadcrumbs in Google Results?

In: web resources

21 Jan 2010

Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis.

Do your site’s breadcrumbs show up in Google’s results? Comment here.

The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don’t give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do.

The move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, "It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its "semantic" period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links."

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, "Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???" Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the "early days" for breadcrumbs.

"Think about the situation with sitelinks," he says. "Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time."

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. "Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time," he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the ">" used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs. Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

Have you seen an increase in clickthrough from breadcrumbs in Google resutls? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> Google Rolls Out Breadcrumb Display in SERPs

> Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From

> Get More Links in Your Actual Google Results

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Tags: expe, google, google webmaster tools, Matt, matt cutts, page, quot, search, site, webpronews readers

Bing Might Replace Google As iPhone Search Engine

In: web resources

21 Jan 2010

Allow us to save you a couple of moments by verifying that today isn’t April 1st and that pigs haven’t taken to the sky. Now, there’s little left to do aside from break the news: Apple and Microsoft are supposed to be in talks to make Bing the iPhone’s default search engine.

BusinessWeek’s Peter Burrows and Cliff Edwards spoke to "two people familiar with the matter," and found out that Google might get bumped from its position as default provider.

The pair reported, "The talks have been under way for weeks, say the people, who asked not to be named because the details have not been made public."

Assuming this is true, it’s likely that the increasing popularity of Android is one of the biggest factors to influence Apple’s decision. Microsoft, which spent at least $100 million launching Bing and has Google beat by $90 billion in terms of market caps, probably offered Apple more money, too.

Still, even the unnamed sources of this rumor haven’t declared that a new arrangement is far from a sure thing. So for the time being, we’ll just have to watch, wait, and hope that a deal between Apple and Microsoft wouldn’t be a sign of the apocalypse.

Related Articles:

> Bing Improves Its Autosuggest Feature

> Bing Makes Out Well In Search Spend Report

> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features