Just when the Best Buys of the world thought that the travesty was over--- when they took the break to take a breath and wipe their brows, thinking that the showrooming phase was over....
They were wrong. Dun dun DUN!
Apple was recently rewarded for their EasyPay solution (allowing consumers to scan things in stores and buy them through their phones through an internet connection). This, in my opinion, seems not just like another one of those cases where Apple just like suing people for the fun of it (just kidding--though let's be honest, it makes sense for them to protect their turf that way, and who's to say that it isn't ALSO fun? Could definitely be part of it). I know, all the Appleheads out there right now are wetting themselves, celebrating the ways that Apple does all things in a miraculous way. But Apple isn't doing anything particularly new here, in fact, it's really taking a page from eBay's book when they acquired Red Laser or maybe even Google's book since they host a plethora of barcode scanning apps such as ShopSavvy and ScanLife and may be even *gasp* have been ahead of the game in incorporating it through Google Goggles (PS- Google Goggles might be one of the sexiest apps concepts I've ever heard of. Google basically said "Anyone can build a barcode scanner, we're going to build something that can recognize bar codes, print ads and OBJECTS. Take that!")
It's okay. Everyone wants to be like Google. Apple just announced a "Blue Sky" initiative allowing their employees to take on pet engineering projects... which sounds an awful lot like Google's "20% Free Time", one of their most productive, innovative management ideas to date.
Everyone likes to bring up the Google Wallet product, since it hasn't been an instant winner. At the IGNITION conference, Chris Haylen (Vice President and General Manager of Payments for Intuit) claimed that Google Wallet wasn't successful because their whole strategy was geared under their advertising agenda. Another popular hypothesis is that they simply don't have the infrastructure to support their solution. Sure, some other companies, like eBay, are celebrating their recent successes in mobile transaction volume, but Google's got something special.
I mean, at least they're not RIM. It's a sad day when you get p0wned by Yahoo.
Finally, even with Google's not so awesome products, we still own it. As seen by this awesome ad.
No comments:
Post a Comment