Although both are American companies operating under the same rules, there is a fundamental difference between Apple and Google's business models.
Apple makes its money from selling you new hardware every year or two - they need to make you lust after slick, shiny things every keynote.
Google makes its money from knowing about you, mining that data and converting that into advertising clicks - they need to collect as much information about you as possible.
Which means that the same pieces of data have different value to the two companies.
(Of course, Facebook follows a similar model to Google)
That's not a surprise. They're in completely different businesses.
Google is a display advertising company that occasionally puts out a better display (Chrome, Android). Apple is in the business of finding and extracting value from hardware markets no one else took seriously.
Apple is primarily a hardware company. Their ad business is successful in a basic-ass, privacy-friendly way, because to show ads on their platform, you have to pay apple, no competitors there. Google literally lives from ads, this is just not a comparison made in good-faith.
They're both all about forcing you into their ecosystem. The difference is that Apple's business is (mostly) about their hardware ecosystem, while Google's is (mostly) about their online services ecosystem.
Apple is a hardware as software company. Google is an advertising company. Apple wants the dollars in your pocket, Google wants your eyes. Discussing things in terms of open, closed access to competitors platforms etc is missing the point of each company.
Apple is no way positioned to harm Google in any way on the longer run. In many ways Apple's products are like what video games, music albums and stereos were in the past. They are products with massive hype, craze and cult following of some kind.
Google on the other hand is a massive Innovation factory, churning innovations by the years. No body really is close to them when it comes to search, on line advertising etc. On top of that they have some of the top most properties on the internet- Mail, News, G+ etc etc.
What you are seeing now is Google really flooding market with their other innovative stuff Google TV, Android, wearable computing, self driving cars, offering peta byte scale data analytic engines etc. Engineering innovation is awesome too.
Apple cannot compete with that sort of company. Their best bet is to assume that their cult following will remain and will go gaga every time they come with a new product.
Apple are primarily a hardware company. They make money on the sale of devices. They also make some money as a marketplace for apps and media. They have no significant revenue from data harvesting or advertising sales.
Google are an advertising company. The overwhelming majority of their revenue is from targeted advertising. Their ability to harvest user data is the primary factor affecting their bottom line.
For Apple, privacy is a no-brainer. It doesn't harm either of their primary revenue streams and it gives them a substantial point of differentiation against their main competitor. Apple have an ongoing commercial imperative to improve the privacy of their products and services; Google have an ongoing commercial imperative to the contrary.
Apple makes the bulk of their money from devices, Google from selling your data. I don't see how you can't see the difference. Sure, Apple is not pure, but their ad revenue is like 1 billion dollars (out of 272), compared to 80% out of 196 for Google.
I think it just shows the primary difference between the two companies. Google is ad-revenue driven by mechanisms that leverage world-scale data mining & analysis. Apple is revenue driven by hardware that leverages high-quality product design. Oversimplifying both I'm sure, but I think most things stem from this.
I agree that they aren't same but I doubt if Apple is even in the same league as Google when it comes to AI.
Apple is a product company that makes iOS+Hardware for profit and also seeks rent to access this platform. Google is synonymous with search/advertising which is fancy word for media. For google that media comes first and platform monopoly comes second. That is why Google continues to offer all its services on iOS despite virtually owning Android.
For every product that Apple builds in future its success will be like a toss of a coin (of course biased). Google succeeds no matter which platform succeeds.
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