It is criminal that Apple gets away with not allowing alternative defaults
ma.tt
ma.tt
We actually live in much better times than the Microsoft monopoly days. Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook have asymmetric business models. Consumers benefit in the long run as they all battle each other.
Apple doesn't have to monetize Maps so they can chip away at Google's ad revenue. Google doesn't have to monetize Android OS and devices so they can chip away at Apple's hardware/software revenue.
iOS market share: 54% (or less, who you believe).
Google Search market share: 67%.
So when Google Search lets you replace Google Maps as the in-page default with Bing Maps/OpenStreetMap/whatever - you know, when you search for a city or zipcode - I'll start worrying about the iOS defaults.
On iOS (and maybe on Android) not that much.
Your argument should have been: Imagine a world, where on your desktop on Windows you can only use Bing Maps. Then your argument might have been valid.
I can't imagine switching away from Google Search. I've tried Bing, I've tried DuckDuckGo. I can't get used to them; the presentation of the results, the stuff I expect to be ranked highly. It's not that they're worse, it's just that I can't rewire a habit of years of searching in Google every day. I wish I could.
But I'm not particularly attached to either the iOS or Android ecosystem. I have an Android phone and an iPad. I could replace them with an iPhone and an Android tablet if I really wanted and I doubt I'd notice much difference.
So when you say "if I am fed up with Google Maps I can use Bing", that's a switch you can make, good for you. I find it harder than you to make the search engine switch, and easier than you to make the smartphone switch. Is that so hard to understand?
At best, you could stick an <IFRAME> in the page and point it at a user configured maps site, only you don't know if it is going to return a maps result. What if the query isn't for a location? Or what if the user's third party map supplier doesn't have the location? Then you get a big empty <IFRAME> with nothing in it, and a bad user experience. You'd also increase the perception that the Google search results are slow because it would take longer for the page to finish loading.
Allowing pluggable providers on the client for launching URL intents makes sense, I don't think it makes as much sense for search engines to federate queries in this way, there are much more difficult performance and privacy issues with such a model.
The Portal/Portlet model of "search" has been tried before and users didn't really like the experience.
When you type in something that generates a map these days, you get Knowledge Graph entries, Maps, Related places and people, and a bunch of other ancillary things. How can Google simultaneously iterate and evolve their search, and at the same time, provided a fixed API for federating this stuff?
This is one of those things that works much better in theory than in practice. I'd rather Google federate social and login before messing with search answers.
But hearing "our way or the highway" coming from a Googler is making the argument for me to try DDG again, so thanks. :)
Secondly, I am for the idea in theory, I just don't think it is practical to do in a way that adds a lot of value. You also have to worry about the legal/privacy ramifications of funneling everyone's queries out to third party providers, I'm pretty sure that would cause a large blowup.
Third, there were already services that sort of did what you ask, for example, MetaCrawler, which was around way before DDG, would federate out queries to multiple search engines and combine the results. It wasn't very pretty.
I'm not sure IFRAMEd results really add that much value for a user, but one could easily conduct the experiment by making a Chrome/Firefox extension that replaces Google Maps results with OpenMaps.
In an ideal world, one wouldn't need fleets of cars and people to make maps databases. There's be some kind of standard, like http://acme.org/geo.json or maybe KML where crawlers would crawl the web to get accurate business listings, indoor maps, photos, menus, hours of operation, and other stuff. And then anyone could write a little bit of JS that could be registered with the browser like <link rel="geopanel" href="geopanel-fancy.js" type="application/business-data">, and when Google or Bing when to show a business listing, they'd just need to output the json record, and any registered providers could render it.
I'd be all in favor of a fully federated world, I'd spoken about it at length in the past (http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...)
But I think one has to be realistic that the the fully open, federated solutions often do not compete favorably with vertically integrated solutions from a user experience point of view. They often can only do so once the underlying features have been fully commoditized.
So yeah, trolling then.
Google's geocoding service is underpinned by a lot of third party datasets which would have to be (very expensively) relicensed if Google started passing the results out to maps under the control of other organisations.
If Bank of America illegally forecloses on people, it's okay because Citibank does that too?
You can nearly count the number of substantial monopoly cases in US history on one hand.
However, take a look over the anti-trust cases just since 1994 (almost none of which have to do with monopolies):
The DOJ is concerned with suppression of competition on an industry level. Amazon/Apple arguably did so. Microsoft certainly did so. Two platforms in fierce competition, neither in a truly dominant market position, using their own Maps application, is not what the DOJ is going to worry about.
Do common law principle apply in some way here? IE, assuming there is no legal precedent, is the lack of litigation elsewhere relevant?
http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/26/disagreements-over...
Paczowski's article says that Google's request to include Latitude was one of four items that were "major points of contention between the two companies" (besides the general deterioration in the relationship between the two companies), while claiming that voice navigation was the most important. Nowhere is it suggested that inclusion of Latitude was non-negotiable or the point on which negotiations crumbled.
Also on current growth trends, Apple is going to lose to Android. So not only don't they have a monopoly, they don't have any prospect of gaining one either.
Apple is doing just fine against Android in the US market, and most developed markets, though I don't expect them to get anything like a monopoly and don't think they're interested in pursuing one.
(1) http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/05/apple-samsung-leng...
It's strictly subjective, and dependent on proving consumer harm. It so happens that more often than not, market share enables companies to more easily cause consumer harm as far as the DOJ is concerned.
Given Apple has, by some accounts, half the smart phone market in the US, they are absolutely a prime candidate for DOJ scrutiny on this matter.
This for example (from comscore):
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/09/06/apples-iphone-hold...
has them at 40.4% as of July and gaining share, by far the leading individual smart phone company. Easily a market position that can draw the DOJ's attention given how large and important the market is.
The alternatives are allowed, but you are buying a singular device, not a platform for other developers per se, it just happens to allow developers to create software for it.
On the other hand, you have Microsoft which has historically been a platform software solution, building a culture of allowing anyone to build on it, licensing portions and features to developers for them to build on. Until recently, there was only tepid attempts at hardware branded Microsoft where as Apple has always been hardware bound to software to the point you can't easily install OSX on anything other than Apple hardware. The same cannot be said for Microsoft, the only other company that is bound by this rule of multiple defaults.
That rule came about because Microsoft had licensing rules that prevent devs from using MS software on their own hardware if that hardware included competing software. If you wanted to use Windows, you HAD TO use IE only. Microsoft was using monopolistic practices, but did not have a monopoly btw.
In a nutshell, Apple is selling a singular device that happens to have a doorway that allows users to install addition software to expand the hardware/OS beyond its default intended (by Apple standards based on analyzing the user market) purposes.
Other alternatives are hardware solutions that allow your choice of software as middleware to gain access to the hardware functionality. Two hugely different ideologies.
One is a fork, the other is build-a-bear.
Getting regulators involved means these decisions will be made based on provable things and rigid rules and that's not ideal here. The best thing for users, progression of technology and such are pretty subjective issues. Legalistic systems are not good at making these kinds of decisions.
They're not optimal either, perhaps worse than just eating things play out. Remember that the IE/MS stuff from the 90s basically sorted itself out. The legal interventions had little effect on the long term. Yes, IE dominance may have slowed down the development of the web for a while. But, the quality gap between IE & Firefox/Chrome combined with improvements in software distribution via the web got the market back to solid competition pretty quickly. Meanwhile the long antitrust stuff was a huge, expensive distraction.
There are genuine reasons for locking down iOS. The reality is that putting power in users hands also creates complexity. The ability to change settings is also the ability to screw up settings. Can't change also means "can't screw up." If a computer has features like this which a user doesn't understand, they effectively reduce the power of that computer for them.
I'm not saying that Apple made the right decisions. I'm not saying their motivations are all about user experience or that the desire to dictate users' maps, browsers, calendars, doesn't play a role. "blatantly self-interested and user-hostile stance" sounds a little strong to me, but it's not completely unreasonable. What I am saying is that we have no perfect solution to these things.
If the choice is leave it to Apple & competition or get judges & lawyers involved, I prefer to let it play out unless things get pretty bad.
Smart phones in the US is a market measured in the tens of billions of dollars per year. Apple has over 40% of it. The money involved makes it a much bigger issue than eg blogging.
First, people do have a choice. Don't buy iOS/iPhone/Tablet. Buy something else that fits your needs. Competition is strong. Problem solved. There's plenty of alternates. As they say, 'vote with your wallet/eyes/?'
Second, shouldn't Apple ultimately fail if this is a bad choice? Won't they get out innovated? Someone pointed out Microsoft, and I agree. They were great 15 years ago. Less so and less so every year, enough so that OS X is considered the 'leader' in the tech community. Hell, even my mom wants a mac now.
Monopoly or not, states set the rules and these two are points where imho government should enforce choice.
Goodbye video console market. Asta la Vista Gameboy. So long Kindle e-book reader. Unless you want to pay triple the current price for your next model of any of those. A sudden price hike like that would kill those markets stone dead.
Be careful what you wish for, lest you get it.
States cannot limit the prosecution of commerce outside itself. It was an attempt to limit state rivalries, such as Texas telling Other states it had to pay a premium to use its ports.
But it's a problem I didn't think of. While I don't mind Kindle, consoles I mind for phones, tablets and 'normal' computers. Probably a distinction should be made.
Yes, you might be able to download something called "Chrome" or "Firefox", but what you're getting isn't those browsers.
What you're getting is iOS Safari the browser, with the interface around it replaced by Google or Mozilla.
This is because Apples TOS forbid you from creating a program that downloads and executes code from the internet to drive your application, which basically means no downloading html/JS and no "executing" html by rendering it, or running JS.
And this is the really criminal part, the default choice, that's just the icing on the cake.
However that'd be a very poor view of what a browser is. A browser is the platform, the runtime if you will, that lets us build applications on the internet.
The first browser was pretty much good at nothing but rendering bits of text, shortly followed by images, and it grew from there.
Today browsers have a myriad of capabilities that make exciting applications on the internet possible, such as: CSS transitions, CSS animations, CSS gradients, CSS calc, html5, WebGL, Web Audio Data, media streaming data, video elements, audio elements, binary data handling, object URLs, zip URLs, binary data requesting, cross origin resources sharing, WebSockets, WebRTC, realtime video/audio capture/encoding/transmission/decoding/playback, and so forth.
This are features of the "browser engine implementation". And not all browsers implement the same features. For instance take iOS safari which lacked the CSS capability for position:fixed and usable overflow:scroll handling until just about a year ago. All browsers in 1997 already implemented this flawlessly, and correctly. But for whatever reason, Apple didn't until more than a decade after the inception of that feature.
Similarly other features aren't implemented, too numerous to list, save for the one that annoys me personally most, that is WebGL.
A similar situation was evident on the desktop internet in the time period between 1998 and 2004, where Internet Explorer 6 ruled supreme. But other browsers (chiefly Firefox) offered a different implementation, and hence put Microsoft under pressure to improve internet explorer if they wish to stay relevant.
The same kind of pressure cannot be exerted on Apples iOS browser, because you're forbidden from exercising it. This is bad for the Web, it's bad for me and it's bad for you.
Unsurmountable barriers to competition are always bad for everybody, except the one building the barrier.
Significantly, the lack of features on iOS Safari, which might be present on Android, makes using these features equally infeasible just as effectively. Nobody wants a mobile webapp that only works on Android.
Lastly, the health of the web should not be governed by the rise and fall of mobile operating systems. Android or iOS may rise or fall, and with it, competitive pressure for the predominant browser vendor would change.
One might argue that it's not the same situation, but it's quite clear that no player wants us to step outside their dome, and it's equally sad - however not surprising in any way.
(tl;dr: go to "google apps" in the settings)
Being the market leader is not the prime qualifier. Consumer harm is.
I would however argue that Apple is in fact the market leader in the US. Individual companies are what matter, not open source platforms; that is, the DOJ is going to look at the behavior of companies. It's the companies who make the money, and charge consumers, and that's where the DOJ looks. If Apple does something with its 40% share (with Samsung at 24%, and companies like Motorola all the way down at 6%), that is viewed as meaningfully harming consumers, the DOJ will pursue them.
If you respect yourself, you don't let others play you.
Agree with you and the OP.