Google threatened by Apple’s Siri
- 07 November, 2011 15:02
- Comments 3
The voice-activated search assistant, Siri, on Apple’s iPhone 4S has made Google concerned about its competition in the market.
In a written submission to the US Senate antitrust subcommittee, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, wrote, “Apple has launched an entirely new approach to search technology with Siri, its voice-activated search and task-completion service built into the iPhone 4S.”
Schmidt believes Siri, along with social networking websites, to be quite a threat to Google because it could change the way information is searched on the Web as users don’t have to rely on Google’s search engine to do a simple search task.
"Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter also allow users to leverage their social networks to find answers to their questions. Google is therefore competing with all methods available to access information on the internet, not just other general search engines," Schmidt wrote.
"The source of Facebook's competition with Google is not only through using Bing to search the internet but, also by offering users a fundamentally different way to discover and connect with information on the internet."
Schmidt did not believe Apple to be a threat in 2010 but is now feeling the heat from the competition of Apple’s Siri.
"Google has many strong competitors and we sometimes fail to anticipate the competitive threat posed by new methods of accessing information,” Schmidt wrote.
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Comments
Woomera
OH....... you mean everyone in the world is going to rush out and buy an iPhone? Garbage......... cheap journalism.
analoggus
@woomera
I do believe you missed the point. The journalist meant nothing of the sort. The reality is that currently, google is the first port of call for searches, even on iPhones. When you want to find something, you google it. The threat represented here is not "everyone in the world is going to rush out and buy an iPhone" but that people WITH iPhones will be using Siri search instead of google search. Apple has no obligation to use Google as Siri's backend. I believe that Google is right to be frightened of competition inserting a step in-between the user and the search engine. It is credibly threatening.
Davy Adams
@woomera there was a similar point in history with Microsoft and an anti-trust hearing. Gates commented that inevitably new technologies would come in that would change things, to Microsoft's disadvantage, but negating the need for government anti-trust action. That's exactly what happened. While everyone may not rush out to buy an iPhone, the inflection point that voice-based search could indicate is certainly worth reporting.
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