Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, said in statement to the Senate antitrust subcommittee that Apple’s new Siri technology is a direct competitor and a threat to Google’s core search business. And Google should be nervous. Siri is going to change how we search for what’s nearby, from restaurants, movies, shops and more.
After receiving the Apple 4S at the Pursuitist HQ, I wrote to Pursutist editor Mack, stating, “Apple upped the bar on search. Siri is a Google-killer.” Why ‘Google’ when you just need to ask Siri?
I don’t think anyone was expecting Apple to enter the search market —but this is exactly Apple’s maneuver with the beta release of Siri with the Apple 4S. With this new mobile voice search product, Steve Jobs and Apple have put Google firmly in the crosshairs.
After Google and ex-Apple board member Schmidt ripped off Apple with their Android mobile platform, Jobs said, “We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business.”
With Siri, Apple has firmly entered the search business. “I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this,” the late Apple CEO told author Walter Isaacson for his recently released biography. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.”
Jobs also vowed to battle Google until “my last dying breath.” And Schmidt knows it…
“Apple has launched an entirely new approach to search technology with Siri, its voice-activated search and task-completion service built into the iPhone 4S,” Schmidt said in a written response to lawmakers on Friday.
Schmidt has backpedalled from his earlier statement in 2010, where he had denied that Apple and Facebook were a “competitive threat.” As reported by AppleInsider, Schmidt now says: “My statement was clearly wrong. Apple’s Siri is a significant development—a voice-activated means of accessing answers through iPhones that demonstrates the innovations in search.”
MG Siegler of TechCrunch agrees that Siri is the first step of Apple entering the search market, adding, “Siri is their entry point. Again, it’s a small step right now, but it has the potential to be massive.”
Jonny Evans of Computerworld also agrees, writing that “chairman Eric Schmidt has admitted his company may have bitten off more than it can chew in its war with Apple, and is running scared of the serious search threat posed by Siri.”
Search, from the minds at Apple, has just gone thermonuclear courtesy of Siri. The sleeping search giant Google has awoken and realized this…
“Google has many strong competitors,” Schmidt concluded in the statement. “So inferring that Google is in any way ‘dominant’ in search would be incorrect.”
