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OK, here’s your original claim about what you were convinced about Apple’s strategy with respect to competition from web/ads companies like Google:

“Am I the only one who is convinced Apple is focused on privacy because its cloud tech is really far behind Google and privacy was a path largely ignored in a data driven world?”

I pointed to the explanation given in 2010 by the founder/CEO of Apple, regarding their stance on privacy — it was conceived because of the risk of third-party developers going rogue as has happened with Facebook/CambridgeAnalytica (even though Zuck was in the audience). Apple’s privacy position was taken independent of Google.

Google’s competitive advantage over Apple today wrt cloud tech comes from public-facing cloud infrastructure & expertise that was previously internal to Google — Google’s cloud advantage was completely non-existent back in 2010 when Jobs granted that interview.

In 2010, GCP didn’t really exist yet, developers/end users could only interact with sandboxed apps on App Engine; GCP was still in infancy, the market leader in cloud tech was and still is AWS.

Google’s main competitive advantage back then was in search, Apple recognized this and did not try to compete head-to-head with Google (like Yahoo! or Bing), or the way Google competed but failed against Facebook. (Apple would later go up against Google in maps.)

OTOH, Apple did try to compete head-to-head with Amazon using iBooks, but they shot themselves in the foot by colluding with publishers to raise prices.



I think there's some misunderstanding about what I'm saying, but unfortunately, I don't think clarification will make this discussion any more fruitful for either of us. I'm sorry, I think it's best for me to disengage for now.




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