Google first helped us to find stuff and then communicate with its Gmail services. Amazon sold us stuff, first books and then pretty much everything. Facebook let us find out whether our friends were 
or 
. Apple sold pretty devices for listening to songs and watching films. Each of these companies was happy doing its own thing and left the others alone.
Now those divisions are breaking down. The big tech firms are on a cybercollision course. Thanks to new hardware, notably tablet computers and smartphones, new software and apps and a world blanketed by wi-fi and 3G (and soon 4G), we work, rest and play online more and more.
We read newspapers on our tablets, listen to music on our iPods or MP3 players, book a restaurant table or a cinema ticket on our smartphones, store our photographs on Flickr and look at our personal and professional email, documents and calendars online.
As the market for digital stuff expands, doing only one thing, however well, is no longer so attractive for tech firms because it’s no longer so lucrative.
What Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google’s Larry Page want to do is to become the sole caterer to all our burgeoning digital needs.
The more services they can offer, the more users they can attract, the more services they can sell us and the more advertising revenue they can generate. The battle to become chief executive of the web is on.
Zuckerberg’s initial public offering is a key part of his attempt to run the web. Facebook may have more than 800 million users but it is small. Last year it had revenues, largely from selling advertisements, of $US3.7 billion ($3.4bn), as against Google’s $US38bn in 2010. To expand, Zuckerberg needs cash and plenty of it.
In May, after the IPO, he will have a war chest of $US5bn. That will enable him to join his rivals in the fab four as each spends big to try to digitise and revolutionise every corner of our lives, taking a slice out of each transaction that results.
How will they do this? Being successful in Silicon Valley means being good at keeping secrets, but here are some of the products that insiders say each firm has hidden up its hoodie sleeves.
Facebook will offer better social networking and communication. It has copied some of the most lauded features of Google’s new social networking service Google+. It promises a broader, more social email-style system that Facebookers insist will replace what they call “old-fashioned” Gmail.
Facebook is flirting with the idea of taking on Google’s core business with its own search service. Not one based on results in cyberspace, however well sifted by algorithms, but on the data provided by you, me and our friends.
A Facebook phone, with photos and status updates uploaded to a Facebook page with a single click, is on the way.
Facebook is joining movie website Netflix, music streaming service Spotify and games maker Zynga to bring us Facebook TV, Facebook movies, Facebook music and Facebook games based on our own preferences and our friends’ recommendations.
There are even Facebook credits, a virtual currency bought with real money that Facebookers use to play computer games. The goal is to make us live wholly inside Facebook’s walled garden, a place Zuckerberg insists with boyish enthusiasm “is going to be really, really good”.
Sadly for Zuckerberg, he has competition from the neighbours and they have an even bigger stash of cash. Apple, which has $US98bn to spend, almost as much ready cash as the US government, has the most popular smartphone model on the market, the iPhone, and the most popular tablet computer, the iPad.
Cook, who took over Apple after Steve Jobs resigned from the chief executive job not long before his death last year, is determined to make them even better. He has, for example, integrated Twitter throughout Apple’s line-up, enabling us to tweet from any app, a feature clearly aimed at dulling Facebook’s mobile growth.
Cook is also working on iPad, iPod and iTunes services that he believes will trump Facebook’s music, movies, TV and games offerings. He wants to sell us e-books through the iBooks part of iTunes, to lure us away from Amazon. Apple’s new iCloud service enables us to write and store our documents, spreadsheets, email, contacts and calendar on Apple’s servers and access them on any device we want, even ones we do not own, in a direct challenge to Google’s online computing services.
Cook is also readying a web-enabled Apple TV. The idea is that we will buy programs and films using iTunes. Television is the most important mass medium yet to be breached by the digital world.
Just down the road from Facebook, Google’s whizzo brains have stopped lounging on beanbags and crunching granola bars while lecturing the world on the virtues of not being evil and started knuckling down to the gritty business of grinding Zuckerberg’s and Cook’s noses into the techno-dirt.
Google has its own version of the iPhone. It’s not a single phone but any handset that runs its Android software. Android phones comfortably outsell iPhones, accounting for almost half of all smartphones sold worldwide. Google has launched a web-based Google TV service, offering programs streamed via the web. It is using Google+ to make its search results more social, to combat Zuckerberg’s social search ambitions. It has launched Google Music, to offer songs, and it owns YouTube, where we can now watch or rent TV programs and films.
In development in Mountain View, Google’s headquarters, is Google Wallet, an online payment program that will enable us to buy stuff by waving our phone at a shop’s paypad.
Google already makes mobile phones in partnership with HTC and Samsung, and recently it spent $US12.5bn snapping up Motorola’s consumer division. It is readying its first own-label, Motorola-built mobile phones and tablet computers to tackle Apple head-on and is even flirting with becoming a telephone service provider.
“We’re still at the very, very early stages of what technology can do,” Page says.
“Our ultimate ambition is to transform the overall Google experience, making it beautifully simple, almost auto-magical.”
And what of Amazon, that other West Coast behemoth that nearly doubled in size between 2008 and 2010 and hit almost $US50bn in annual revenues last year? It has new hardware, the Kindle Fire, which helpfully comes loaded with the account details of Amazon users, making it easier than ever to buy stuff. The Fire also boasts social networking that connects Amazon users with others who share tastes in books and films, a direct challenge to Facebook.
Amazon offers a new app shop, a new online payment system, TV and movie streaming and cloud computing for individuals and businesses.
As they jostle for position, each of the tech titans is as busy talking down the opposition as it is talking itself up.
Apple has vowed to “destroy” Google’s Android mobile phone and tablet computer operating system, which senior executives dismiss as “theft” of Apple technology. Apple is suing manufacturers of Android devices all over the world for patent infringement.
Google’s response? “Failing to succeed in the smartphone market, they are resorting to legal measures.”
Facebook hired the PR firm Burson-Marsteller to plant negative stories about Google. When it got caught, it said sorry.
This is what happens when an entire industry reboots itself. The great tech war of 2012 marks the start of the third age of computing. In the beginning, firms battled to sell us hardware. It was IBM vs Apple vs whatever beige box we liked the look of. Then hardware became a commodity and firms competed to sell us better software — Microsoft Windows v Apple OS v Google’s online services.
Now, in the mobile internet age, firms are battling to create the best online platform, offering a vast, seamlessly connected suite of anytime, anywhere services that we use all day, every day and that become as much a part of our lives as the air we breathe. Creating the dominant platform matters so much because it will give the winning firm the lion’s share of the world’s eyeballs. More eyeballs means more direct sales of hardware, software and services, and advertising. But eyeballs offer something even more valuable, something tech firms prize more than anything else: data.
Every time you or I log on to Google, Facebook, Amazon or iTunes, we leave digital fingerprints. With our search queries, our “likes”, the songs we listen to, the TV programs we watch, the books we buy and our tweets, we reveal who we are. Thanks to our computer’s IP address and location-based technology in mobile phones, we also disclose where we are.
This accurate, real-life, real-time information is an invaluable treasury. It enables Google and Facebook to offer advertisers the chance to reach their target market and even to advertise to them at particular times of the day and in places where they are most likely to respond. Facebook, whose data is even more valuable because we tell it more about ourselves and it knows who our friends are, is desperate to start using it to ramp up its ad sales to Google-like proportions.
Analysts think the digital advertising sector could be worth $US200bn by 2020.
There’s a problem here, of course. Apart from Apple’s natty hardware and all the big players’ software and apps, critics say the fab four create little or nothing. What they do is make all the money in the world by exploiting other people’s stuff.
Most of the content we find when we do a Google search is created by others, but Google sells ads against the search. The content creators do not receive a share of the ad revenue.
Google points out that its search engine sends users to the content creators’ websites, where each can try to make money itself.
Amazon sells books at prices lower than publishers and booksellers say is fair. Facebook does not create the data it uses to sell advertising. We agree to hand the data over when we sign up and we do not get to opt out.
Apple pays record labels for the music it sells through iTunes but keeps a big chunk of sales revenue for itself: iTunes now in effect runs the music industry.
With an eye to the bottom line, the fab four bitterly resist any attempt to stop them exploiting one another’s content. Each spends billions on lobbying politicians to drive home their case that any regulation of the internet would impinge on free speech and free trade. Who could object to freedom, right?
Well, more and more of us. Newspapers, including this one, have set up paywalls to ensure readers pay for high-quality journalism rather than simply getting it free. Hollywood studios, which are battling piracy, are backing the (now shelved) Stop Online Piracy Act in America, which aims to make internet service providers do more to respect copyright. Facebook is facing a backlash from users over its decision to publish all their posts in a timeline that creates a permanent online diary of its users’ lives for all to see.
In her new book, I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy, Lori Andrews, an American law professor, calls for a new constitution governing how web firms can exploit our data and the content generated by traditional businesses.
How do the hi-tech firms respond to critics? They don’t care much, and since they are making more money than god, who can blame them? For now, regulators show little interest in clipping tech firms’ wings. Most consumers seem pretty happy, too.
Polls — and sales — show that our desire for a connected future vastly outweighs any concerns we may have that we will become slaves to the machine.
Ultimately, it is you and I who will decide the victor of the great tech war of 2012. Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have gone from being the dreams of the young and the obsessions of the stubborn to a place in the dictionary because almost everyone reading this article uses them. Whichever we keep logging on to will keep growing. Whichever we lose interest in won’t.
Source:http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/race-to-win-cyber-world/story-e6frg6z6-1226263165917
