3 ms·
It is precisely an either/or because it has made $8B in profit last quarter. Apple as a massive company must make thousands, hundreds of thousands of tiny decis
by zghst 9y ago
It is precisely an either/or because it has made $8B in profit last quarter. Apple as a massive company must make thousands, hundreds of thousands of tiny decisions to make it's business more profitable.
Investing in iOS attracts more customers and buy in to its products and services. Investing in Safari is not a key differentiator for their business and rivals will be able to easily implement the same features. Apple is smart not to play Google's game.
If Apple were to engage in this, the browser now becomes a selling point of the phone. Apple goes from iOS/iPhone company to Safari company. They give away their offering/unique selling point that no other company has, along with their massive advantages as a market leader.
Because their tech and business strategy is more developed in this space (browsers), Google can start acquiring customers at a lower cost than Apple without having to differentiate its core product more than the fact that it has more APIs/features. We see Google already does this to a degree, they market their products more on the feature set rather than the mission and brand.
Web technologies also inherently support Google's business strategy, the more APIs in the browser, the more data Google can collect on Apple's users, the more advanced targeting they can do to swipe away Apple's customers and collect intelligence on what Apple is up to. Do not be fooled, every time there is an API added to the browser, there are teams of people at Google ready to capitalize on it to help drive profits.
It would be a bad, bad bet for Apple to start all of sudden focusing its energies on Safari. As a SWE, it is completely understandable why Apple gives Safari little love, I'm okay with it.