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Google, Apple, and Microsoft Struggle for Your Internet Experience
CASE STUDY r w
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I I are in an epic struggle to dominate your
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n what looks like a college food fight, the three Internet titans-Google, Microsoft and Apple-
can listen to music and watch videos 24/7? It's no
surprise, then, that today s tech titans are so aggressively battling for control of this brave new
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Internet experience. What's at stake is where you search, buy, find your music and videos, and what device you will use to do all these things. The prize is a projected 2015 $400 billion e-commerce marketplace where the major access device will be a mobile smartphone or tablet computer. Each firm generates extraordinary amounts of cash based on different business models. Each firm brings billions of dollars of spare cash to the fight. In this triangular fight, at one point or another, each firm has befriended one of the other firms to
mobile world.
Apple, Google and Microsoft already compete in an assortment of fields. Google has a huge edge in advertising, thanks to its dominance in Internet search. Microsoft's offering, Bing, has grown to about 10 percent of the search market, and the rest essentially belongs to Google. Apple is the leader in mobile software applications, thanks to the popularity of the App Store for its iPhones. Google and Microsoft have less popular app offerings on
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the Web.
combat the other firm. Two of the firms-Google and Apple -are determined to prevent Microsoft from expanding its dominance beyond the PC desktop. So Google and Apple are friends. But when it comes to mobile phones and apps Goggle and Apple are enemies: each want to dominate the mobile market. Apple and Microsoft are determined to prevent Google from extending beyond its dominance in search and advertising. So Apple and
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Microsoft is still the leader in PC operating systems