Apple possibly working on a search engine?
File this one under kinda, maybe, probably not – but the rumor du jour on this fine Thursday morning is that Apple may well be toying with the idea of taking on the Big G in the search game. On the surface, yes, this sounds patently ridiculous. Why would Apple enter a market so firmly dominated by a huge companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft? Oh wait, yeah, Apple kinda went there with the iPhone and that seems to be working out ok. Can lightning possible strike yet again as Apple enters yet another market and makes big waves? Maybe. Safari currently owns about 7% of the browser market and we all know how popular the iPhone is. Right there, Apple has a pretty big in if it was to attack Google head-on. Apple’s market share with Mac computers is also steadily rising and no one expects it to slow down any time soon. Last but not least, let us not forget how, umm, loyal Apple fans can be. If Apple were to release a high-quality search engine option, rest assured the legions of die hard Apple fans would be on board pretty quickly. If Apple is truly working on a search product, it’s definitely not going to be another Cuil. At the same time, it’s going to take a pretty phenomenal product along with some brilliant marketing to make a dent in Google’s game. If anyone is up to the task however, it might just be Cupertino…
@justinhub2003
Spell much or write a sentence?
rediculous, puiss, couldnt, its, there gonna spread themselves too thin and then and on the next iphone
Let me guess the name…iSearch? iExplore? iGoogle?
Seriously Apple, go home. Just because you had success with the iPhone doesn’t mean you’ll have success with this. There’s no chance when they have to deal with Yahoo, Google, MSN, and others. While they’re at it, they might as well make their own game console…iGame.
This is nuts. With one exception, none of you seem to know that GOOG’s CEO, Eric Schmidt is a prominent director on AAPL’s board. Search is a very crowded space and it would be extremely arrogant of AAPL to encroach on GOOG’s turf like this in any other way than as was suggested earlier with AAPL being a front-end to GOOG. MSFT on the other hand would be an incredibly more profitable company if it sold off MSN, XBox and the like. Their arrogance keeps them in shackles.
Maybe it will be just like eWorld. Yea, they’re great at web software. Apple is great at designing products that can be designed once, then marketed and sold w/o changes over a big production run. They are not so great at the continuous iterative improvements and evolutions that are required.
How much of their 7% is from the way they have ‘pushed’ Safari out with iTunes updates?