Apple and Google in the headlines

IE Focus | By Ricardo Perez, Professor at IE Business School

Apple and Google go head to head in the race for mobile dominance. Apple is pushing for pay-per-click services while Google defends flat rates.Apple and Google have been making the headlines with revolutionary product launches these last weeks. American news programs once again held Steve Jobs up as as a champion of innovation, design, envy, advanced technology and anything else you might like to name.

Meanwhile, the boys at Google haven’t been idle. They have launched their own telephone to compete with the iPhone and Nokia and RIM (Blackberry) intelligent phones. What started out as a close collaboration and agreement between companies trying to “reinvent the game” in their respective markets is now morphing into direct competition. Their view of the growing convergence of communication networks, technologies and social behavior leads to collisions in key markets like content consumption, mobile technologies and entertainment. Let’s analyze their collision courses.