"If I were Google, I'd hold off on releasing a Maps for iOS just a little while. It's firmly in the "killer app" category at the moment and might help spur Android adoption just a little."
Based on this logic google should withhold search (after contract runs out) and only serve youtube in VP8. Releasing Maps soon but not immediately for Google (which is what it looks like they are doing) wins in several ways:
(1) reap the benefits of Apple's Maps launch negative publicity for a couple weeks.
(2) once your app hits, more people are using your services. Google loves people doing this.
(3) and less people using Apple Maps and helping improve it. Keeps the gap wide.
(4) finally, if not approved, you can use the disapproval as another competitive advantage.
Nope. Maps is a huge differentiator. Search & Youtube is not. Windows and Android phones have good maps, iOS doesn't. No one will care much if the search is switched to bing or if youtube was not available as an app. Also youtube makes it money via ads which it shows in the latest app. I don't think google is monetizing maps much.
I agree YouTube may not be, but search is pretty big. However, Google would have a hard time blocking google.com from iPhone users without being anticompetitive.
They can not expend the effort to create a google maps app for iphone, but that's not the same as being actively anticompetitive as they would have to be if they wanted to block search from iPhone users.
Sorry. You missed the point. Google wants as many people to use youtube & search. It makes money via ads on both. Having it as default is good (google pays money to FF to be default for example) and even if it is not the default, people can use google by typing google.com in safari. From there, the experience is identical.
Similarly for youtube, google wants the widest audience. Wider the audience, more the ads and more money.
If apple switches from google to bing for safari default, apple gets to spite google a bit and google may lose quite a bit of traffic. This hurts Google. Google will never want to block iOS users from search or youtube.
Secondly, neither is a competitive advantage in smartphone markets. No one is going to switch platforms for either search or youtube.
Maps on the other hand, does not have much advertising. The previous app did not have any advertising at all. They got location data from it but they can get that from android phones. Google loses nothing if they don't release an app. If they don't release an app, it is a great advantage for android. So they have a tradeoff to make, whether to maintain that competitive advantage or release a maps app and gain some audience. If I were google, I wouldn't release maps. For the first time ever, android is way way ahead of iOS in one of the core features.
Incorrect: the maps app in iOS < 6 had plenty of ads in the form of sponsored listings. I can recall several times on a road trip recently where I searched for a point of interest, and got a sponsored listing... Sometimes it was right on top of the non-sponsored point, so I had to zoom in really far just to be able to select the desired pin.
iOS maps is basically another ad platform... And with iOS 6 being adopted at a high rate, Google would lose all those "eyeballs" and crowd sourced data if they didn't release their own iOS maps app.
I think the biggest thing, which is something Google can't bring to the table, is that any app that used the native API will now loom like crap. (iirc, that's how it worked)
Based on this logic google should withhold search (after contract runs out) and only serve youtube in VP8. Releasing Maps soon but not immediately for Google (which is what it looks like they are doing) wins in several ways:
(1) reap the benefits of Apple's Maps launch negative publicity for a couple weeks.
(2) once your app hits, more people are using your services. Google loves people doing this.
(3) and less people using Apple Maps and helping improve it. Keeps the gap wide.
(4) finally, if not approved, you can use the disapproval as another competitive advantage.