Entrepreneur Watch

Will Steve Jobs make a cheap iPhone?

Sources told Peter Burrows at Bloomberg BusinessWeek that Apple is working on a small, cheap (and out of control?) version of the iPhone to slow the infiltration of the Android from Google. 

Really, really interesting, and a major strategy shift rom Steve Jobs if true.

Since his comeback, Jobs has seemed content to stick to his pre-firing strategy of capturing the high end of markets and letting the "clones" take the bulk of the business. That happened in PCs, where imitations of the Mac OS (a product from Microsoft called "Windows") took over the PC business, leaving the Mac as a niche player. An important, cutting-edge, Mercedes-type niche, but still a niche.

Jobs has seemed willing to continue that strategy in smart phones and now tablets, letting Google play the old Microsoft role: Imitate Apple's software and license it to all hardware makers. That means Micros- er, Google, sells more units and attracts more apps from the independent market over the long-term.

It's been working for Google. Canalys says Android phones have started taking over current sales of the smart phone market.

At the end of 2009, Android captured 9% of smart phones sales, while iPhone got 16%.

One year later, Android took 33%, iPhone 16.0%.

(Raw numbers from Canalys here)

I figured Jobs was happy with this approach. After all, Apple's profits and stock price are outstanding. But I've had a bad habit of underestimating him. I admit it. He's a genius. (Well, I've always admitted that.) He's smarter than I. He's the greatest pioneer since Thomas Edison said "Let there be light bulbs." He will continue to surprise everyone, no matter how used we've become at being surprised by him.

Perhaps Jobs is entering a new phase: Undisputed market leader. Bad for Google if he decides to do that.

Maybe he's still just thinking about this mass-market iPhone. Now that the iPhone is coming out on the Verizon network, we'll have to see if Android will continue its momentum. If not, Jobs may not have to make this change. Or maybe he'll do it anyway.

Hell, what do I know?

 

 

Nokia + Microsoft vs. iPhone vs. Android

Ed Burnette at ZDNET has a funny interpretation of the announcement that Microsoft and Nokia are teaming up to create a "new ecosystem" in smart phones.

Right.

I'm always wary of underestimating Microsoft. It tends to create good products after the third try. It created a nice search engine with Bing. And it's gaining. Hitwise reports that Google's market share is stalled at only 71% of the market, while Bing has risen a point or so in the last sixth months, powering up to about a 9% market share. Comscore says Bing is up to 11.5% while Google is only at 65.5%.

Besides, Bing is the new Yahoo! That oughta help.

So what's this new ecosystem stuff? A powerful new Smart Phone system based on Nokia hardware and Microsoft software! 

Microsoft has done it before. I mean, Windows for the PC became a great ecosystem. Sure, it got a little head start by becoming the OS for the IBM PC back in the Lower Cretaceous Period of the PC. And Bill Gates was smart enough to keep the right to license it to others and take over the PC world like the marsupials that took over the dead dinosaur niche and eventually evolved into Bill Gates.

But, hey, now it's got Nokia to give it a ... well, a fourth place head start. I'm sure the same strategy will work as other smart phone makers jump on the "Nokia Windows Phone Smart Phone" (NWPSP) standard!

OK, it doesnt have the pizazz of the "IBM PC" standard. They're working on that, I'm sure.

Ballmer points out that there must be millions of apps companies who already know how to build Windows apps -- you know, those folks that build apps for PCs, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. -- and are anxious to leverage their Windows skills for the smart phone market. Or, at least, the apps developers hope they will find themselves in the pole position once the NWPSP ecosystem takes off the way Bing has.

Already, Ballmer says there are over 8,000 apps for Windows Phone. The iPhone apps market, by contrast, is stalled at about 300,000 apps.

He also notes that by combining Nokia's power in phone hardware and Microsoft's huge advertising budget, the two of them will create "a shared roadmap so that we can really align and drive the future evolution of the mobile phone."

God knows that's needed. Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin don't seem to have much of a road map.

Nokia and Microsot are now the underdogs in this fight, so they're going to fight harder. And they've both been there before. About 30 years ago.

I'm sure they still remember how it's done.

Faster mobile phones: What is LTE?

LTE, or Long Term Evolution, sounds like a refinement of Darwin's theories to me. But it's the next generation of wireless networks to follow 3G – although,according to Wikipedia, the first implementations may be considered 3.9G rather than 4G.

Plus, I read on Nortel's site, it uses a new modulation technique (OFDM) and a new antenna technology (MIMO) and...

And who cares??

I had a chance to talk with Steve West, VP of Emerging Technology and Media for Alcatel-Lucent, at the GigaOm Mobilize conference last week, and asked him to give me the short version of what's important about LTE.

“In the simplest terms, LTE is the first all-IP mobile network,” he said. “It was designed to be a broadband data network.”

Ah, that's good. It uses Internet Protocol standards, so that it can transmit both voice and data seamlessly, the way the Internet can transmit both data and voice. Mobile networks until now were designed with voice transmission in mind first; data was an add-on. Reverse that and you increase efficiency (the Internet can already do voice.)

Wireless and apps companies can now develop a total package to suit user's needs. Instead of one data plan for the home and one for the phone, it can all come together. “We don't have two separate networks any more,” says West.

And, of course, the network will be fast. “LTE was designed to give the types of bandwidth you would get from fiberoptics to the home,” says West. Theoretically, that means up to 80 megabits per second, both upstream and down.

Right now, the average wired connection speed from the home is 4.7 megabits per second in the U.S. South Korea is fastest, with about 10 megabits per second.

It will take a while to get to that kind of speed. In its LTE tests, Verizon Wireless is getting a maximum of 40 to 50 megabits per second for downloads and 20 to 25 megabits per second for uploads. But in the real world, that will be 5-12 Mbps down and 2-5 Mbps up when it launches, according to FierceWireless.

LTE is barely starting to roll out. Metro PCS just launched its LTE network (it skipped over 3G to get a head start on the competition) in the last couple weeks. Verizon Wireless is aiming for the end of 2010, and AT&T for mid-2011, according to ars technica.

Final advantage to LTE: It's being adopted in both the U.S. and Europe. Take your LTE phone to Europe and it will work.

LTE summary: Internet-compatible, fast, universal. Nuff said. 

Til next time, when I'll talk about what it means for mobile apps.

iPhone kickbacks?

Apple employee accused of accepting $1 million in kickbacks from iPhone suppliers. Wonder if fixing this will lower iPhone prices?

According to WSJ, he sold them "confidential information that would let (the suppliers) negotiate favorable contracts with Apple ... including sales volume forecasts, product specs, competitors' target prices and bids."

Apple apparently found out through the employee's gmail and hotmail accounts. 

This is a lesson that there is often less privacy online than we would care to believe. And sometimes that lack of privacy is useful in tracking down criminal activity.

Google is the new Microsoft. Apple is the new Apple

UPDATE, July, 2010

There is no longer any doubt: Google is becoming the new Microsoft. In the rise of the age of the personal computer in the 1980s, Microsoft positioned itself as the dominant software provider for the PC, becoming one of the largest technology companies in the world. Today, with the continued and rapid expansion of the Internet, Google is fast becoming the dominant supplier of software for the Internet. It is destined to become the leading Internet software company.

Google is no longer just a search company. It is now a rising presence in Web browsers, mobile phone software, email, online maps, blogging software, language translation services, productivity software, and online video--all technologies that touch and are being transformed by the Internet. 

It is showing great promise in new products for searching and communicating in real time, free telephony service, and social networking (TechCrunch reports it is buying Facebook apps maker Slide.) 

The Android is a hit. The figures may change when sales of the iPhone 4 come out, but research firm NPD reports that Android phones are now outselling both the iPhone and the Blackberry.

It is working on a desktop operating system, a tablet computer to compete with Apple’s iPad, a new social network called ‘Google Me’, the long-rumored GDrive that will automatically synchronize everything on your personal computer with a personal online storage system, and many other projects that have not yet come to light.

This is all part of Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s strategy to push the development of the Internet as quickly as possible and to become the leading software company of the Internet Age. It will, of course, also increase Google’s wealth as more people get online and expand its advertising revenues.

The advantage Google has in each of these areas is three-fold. The first is its powerful and dominant Internet advertising business, which enables the company to offer many free products, a capability that companies such as Microsoft and Apple will find difficult to match.

The second is its incredible wealth and willingness to invest heavily in these new areas with little concern for how it affects the company’s stock price. Its stock continues to swing widely, anathema to most public companies. Since going public at $85 per share in 2004, its stock peaked at over $700 per share in 1997, dropping to $262 a year later, and recovering to $620 a year after that. Between January and July of 2010, its stock again lost over a quarter of its value to bottom out at $436. Microsoft executives would be apoplectic over such gyrations.

Still, Larry and Sergey are willing to reach deep into their hoard of cash to buy other promising companies. As of mid-2010 Google has spent many billions to buy or invest in about 75 companies to boost its technology and offerings. It has its own venture capital fund, Google Ventures, seeded with $100 million, to invest in promising start-up companies. This makes it unlikely that some brilliant entrepreneurs will blindside Google with a powerful new technology, at least as long as the Internet continues to be the dominant platform in computing.

Microsoft will fade against the Google onslaught, just as IBM faded in the wake of Microsoft’s rise two decades ago. Interestingly, if Microsoft is the new IBM and Google is the new Microsoft, which company will be the new Apple? The answer is simple: Apple.

Right now, with the brilliant Steve Jobs back at the helm of Apple, it is continuing to innovate, in online music, mobile phones and portable computer platforms. But Apple is falling into the same position it had relative to Microsoft in the PC Age; high-end products that have a loyal following and high prices, but much lower market share. It is the Jaguar of the computer and Internet world, while Google is the Honda or Toyota. That’s because Steve Jobs is pursuing his old approach--creating integrated hardware and proprietary software that he stubbornly controls.

Microsoft dominated and set the standards for computing because it focused only on software, courting every PC maker in the world to use its products. Today, Jobs strictly controls the manufacturing, the components and the applications of products such as the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, however, are seeking deals with all the major PC, mobile phone and other manufacturers and service providers whose business touches the Intnernet. That will, in the end, give Google the largest market share.

Why? Consider the Android smartphone OS. Google licenses it the way Microsoft licenses Windows. Android is available on more than 60 devices and several mobile networks, and the applications do not have to be cleared by the man at the top. Apple’s iOS is available only on the iPhone and AT&T’s network, although there are rumors that it will finally become available for the Verizon Wireless network soon. Market researcher Gartner predicts that Android will pass the iPhone in market share in 2012. The Blackberry is still the most popular “smart phone”, but it is losing momentum.

Even Apple’s customers are starting to rebel. A research firm called Vision Critical surveyed iPhone users to find out what they think their phones lack, and the list of features they came up with reads like a list of technology already available on the newest Android phones. The list includes the ability to run on a choice of wireless carriers, the ability to run on a 4G network, an 8 megapixel camera, a larger display, a removable battery and a physical keyboard. Apple may start adding such features, but Steve Jobs stubbornly believes that he knows what’s best for customers--and for Apple--and is known for ignoring such feedback. Android phone manufacturers can provide whatever features they wish.

Of course, becoming the new Microsoft also puts a lot of heavy baggage on Google’s flight. Government agencies around the world are scrutinizing its moves for antitrust violations. In early July, 2010, the European Union’s antitrust chief said he was looking “very carefully” at allegations that Google unfairly ranks competitors’ sites lower in search results. The irony here is that one of the main reasons Google became successful in the first place is that it alone among all the major search engines refused to bias its search results. There is no discernible evidence that Larry and Sergey have changed their strategy now. Type any company stock ticker name into Google, for example, and Yahoo Finance appears above Google Finance. Larry and Sergey have always been adamant that search results must always be unbiased. But competitors complain and regulators, wary of Google’s increasing power, will listen.

Controversies surrounding Google’s tactics continue unabated. News organizations such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. are still threatening Google with lawsuits for stealing snippets of news from his publications. Viacom was dealt a setback in its suit against YouTube over copyright infringement when a U.S. court ruled against Viacom in June 2010, but Viacom says it will appeal.

More and more people are also becoming skeptical about Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” philosophy. That philosophy is being put to its biggest test now as it struggles with the Chinese government over censorship. When hackers broke into Google customers’ email accounts in China in early 2010, Sergey was irate. Saying that the hack targeted Chinese dissidents, he made it clear that he thought the attack had government backing. It pushed Sergey too far, and he announced that Google was no longer willing to censor itself in China. Google moved its operations to Hong Kong, where the laws are more liberal, and stopped censoring its search results. But it has to renew its license to continue doing business in China every year. Google recently renewed its license to do business in China, but it still struggles with the censorship issue, and China recently blocked.

Leaving China would be an enormous blow to Google’s future. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has made it clear that he has no problem doing business in China and censoring his company’s search results, and the Chinese search engine Baidu continues to gain market share. If Google drops out of China completely, its will be giving up a huge and growing market. If it compromises, it reputation as a corporation fighting against evil will take a big hit. The battle of wills is going to be intense and important to Google’s future. For Larry and Sergey, it is a fight between revenues and principle.

Nevertheless, Google’s momentum will continue to grow, along with all the challenges it faces. Becoming the new Microsoft may not be the description Larry and Sergey would like to have, but it is inevitable. Years ago when Microsoft’s then-CEO Bill Gates was asked if new developments in technology could make his company obsolete, he scoffed, asserting (with an amazing lack of insight to the rising danger of the Internet) that as long as there are computers in the world, Microsoft’s opportunities are strong. Now Larry and Sergey could make a similar claim: As long as the Internet is a powerful force in computing, Google’s prospects--and the controversies it faces--are nearly limitless.

 

Steve Jobs takes a lesson from Toyota

Steve Jobs is finally doing the right thing. Fortunately, he didn't take as long as Toyota. 

You know, I used to report on the auto industry from Detroit in the darkest days of the 1980s. The Japanese companies had good reputations for quality, Detroit had a deservedly bad rep. 

The stupid thing was that the American automakers always denied any flaws in their vehicles, even as the government forced them into recalls over those imaginary glitches, from bad bumpers to mechanical glitches. The Japanese were smarter. They immediately and voluntarily recalled any vehicle alleged to have a design flaw. Guess which team was considered more trustworthy?

You see where I'm going with this.

A few decades later, Toyota president Akio Toyoda forgot that lesson when allegations arose of faulty brakes in some models. Questions of faulty brakes first arose in 2006. First the company denied the problem. Then it blamed the drivers, then floor mats, then a software glitch. It finally recalled cars for repairs early this year.

Steve Jobs started down the same path when alleged problems with the antenna in the iPhone 4 arose. First Apple denied the problem, then blamed customers for holding the phone wrong, then blamed a software glitch that made the phone claim there was better reception than you thought (without explaining why that glitch went away when you held the phone.) For a while, it looked like Jobs had his head up his muffler, and told customers to just buy a new $30 rubber bumper if they're so worried.

Today he got it (mostly) right: Free bumpers and a refund to customers who had already bought the casings. Apple is at last offering customers a fix, even if it doesn't solve the core problem.

Still, he denies there is a problem, despite claims that an engineer allegedly told him the antenna design could cause problems in the early design phase of iPhone 4. 

Maybe the problem is blown out of proportion by the press (although Consumer Reports doesn't think so.) Either way, this isn't the way to handle this kind of problem.

The right way is to do extensive testing immediately, quit the denials, and do something, even if it means recalling the phones (or cars) and doing whatever fix you can come up with.

As Toyoda has learned, it's better in the long run. Nobody wants to think they're being cheated by an uncaring company. Bite the bullet, take a revenue hit, and get past it. Customers deserve respect. Even if the issue is overblown.

Do cell phones cause cancer?

Maureen Dowd and Gavin Newsom, both people I respect, think we need to be concerned about radiation from cell phones.

Personally, I'm more worried about radiation from flying saucers. Been thinking about lining my hat with foil.

Dowd harkens back to the time when we didn't know that sun tans and cigarettes were harmful.

Yeah, well, we did as soon as we ran some studies.

There have been many studies on cell phone radiation and cancer. The very few that suggest there may be a link look as authoritative as BP spokesman touting Big Oil's safety record.

Dowd cited "one Swedish study" that showed a 400% increase in brain tumors among people who started using cell phones as teens a decade ago. She doesn't say which Swedes did the study.

Right. How many people were in the study? How many in the control group? And just how many got cancer? Were any of them wearing aluminum foil in their hats?

If you want to see a good summary of studies about cell phone and cancer, check out Environment Health and Safety Online (ehso.org)

My summary of their summary:

Four studies concluded there may be a correlation between cell use and cancer. 

    -- One was done by the World Health Organization, but we have not seen the results of the study yet. Only says it may increase risk. Hostile aliens may land in my back yard, too. But we'll wait for further info.

    -- Another was conducted by an Australian neurosurgeon who reviewed studies others had done and concluded there was "an increasing body of evidence" for a link. But this paper was self-published and was not peer-reviewed, so I'd give it about as much authority as my college paper on Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock." I hated that class.

    -- The third, from the Swedish National Institute for Working Life, concluded that heavy cell phone users had a 3.7 X higher risk of brain tumors. But it was criticized because it required the subjects to recall how heavily they used cell phones a decade ago, at a time when anyone with brain cancer figures the cell phone caused it. The subjects may have been biased. Maybe this was the study Ms. Dowd referred to.

    -- The fourth is another Swedish study. Very specific, this one. People in rural areas who use digital cell phones "may be at greater risk for brain cancer." But the authors admit their study was small and some bigger ones are needed.

Other studies have shown no cancer link. Ehso.com cited five.

    -- the first was done at the Florida Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, and found that cell phones may protect against Alzheimer's. Wierd. I guess if you use cell phones you'll get cancer, but at least remember that you have it.

    -- Another involving four Scandinavian countries found no increased risk at all. But the researchers say their population study of 16 million people may have been too small to determine a slight increase in risk. 16 million? The study also only covered five years, and it may take longer for cancers to develop.

    -- Tokyo Women's Medical University surveyed 322 brain cancer patients and 683 healthy people and found no correlation between cell use and the cancer.

    -- Scientists in Denmark followed 420,000 cell phone users over 21 years. Again, no correlation.

    -- A four-year British study of 966 people with brain tumors and 1,716 people withpout tumors showed no correlation. 

And finally, a big meta-study involving a bunch of researchers and medical organizations, (the study is here) went through 465 articles, 23 case-control studies, involving 38,000 people to find a link. The conclusion:

"The current study found that there is possible evidence linking mobile phone use to an increased

risk of tumors from a meta-analysis of low-biased case-control studies. Prospective cohort studies

providing a higher level of evidence are needed."

So this isn't exactly comparable to our ignorance of sunbathing and smoking. Lots of studies, inconclusive results, but generally hard to find a link. So choose your own paranoia.

And one other thing should be added: If cell phones are causing cancer, nobody knows why. The radiation they produce is NOT ionizing radiation, which can cause cancer. The radio frequency cells use has never been shown to cause cancer.

My feeling: 

Use a phone headset. Just to be safe. It's easier than the aluminum-foil route.

Steve Jobs takes revenge on Google, knocks AdMob off iPhone

I've said it before:

"Steve Jobs does not like Google these days. What if he were to decide to ban Google apps from the iPhone or other products? It would hurt Apple users, but I can imagine Steve Jobs giving it a shot."

Well, Steve Jobs has modified his iPhone advertising in a way that seems to me to be designed specifically to weaken Google ads on the iPhone.   

Steve is limiting the ability of iPhone advertising systems to collect analytics about users when, for example, "an advertising service provider [is] owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of ... mobile operating systems." They have to get Apple's permission first.

Gee, now what mobile advertising system is owned by a developer of mobile operating systems? Besides Google, AOL and Microsoft appear to be excluded from collecting user information, according to the Wall Street Journal.

ComputerWorld points out that "Of all the ad requests [AdMob] served in April, nearly 32% went to iPhones and iPod Touches." That's nearly four times the number of ads it serves on Android phones. So far. 

No analytics = less effective, less relevant ads.

This hurts Apple users. Less effective competition in advertising. Steve Jobs exercises his imperial control over his devices.

It's revenge on Google for competing with Apple. Jobs (inadvertently, I'm sure) single-handedly got the FTC to approve Google's AdMob purchase when he acquired Quattro. The FTC, thinking (without evidence) that Apple would provide significant mobile advertising competition, used it as an excuse to approve the Quattro acquisition. 

Well, if Apple wasn't going to be a significant advertising competitor with  Google, I guess it will be now.

The Wall Street 

sers.

"Steve Jobs does not like Google these days. What if he were to decide to ban Google apps from the iPhone or other products? It would hurt Apple users, but I can imagine Steve Jobs giving it a shot."

What Google needs to do

Anti-trust regulators, privacy advocates and others are afraid of Google's growing power. And Google is likely to grow faster than a baseball player on steroids. But its continued success is not a simple matter of momentum. It's moving into areas that need more expertise that Google has at the moment, and it needs to fill gaps in its team of developers.

1. Google needs more grunt work programmers.

Google arguably has the best computer scientists in the world but they can't seem to finish a product. As it moves into things like browsers, operating systems and productivity tools, it needs a strong group of cleanup batters. It can't just keep jumping into new product areas, which is what A-team players like to work on. It has got to start doing the grunt work to get them out of beta. And those grunts have to be treated as though they're as important as the superstars, because they are.

I use the Google Chrome browser. But in its default configuration, it supports Yahoo and Outlook and other email programs, but does not support its own Gmail! When I click on an email address through the browser it fires up my wife's Yahoo account.

According to its support site, a lot of people have trouble figuring out how to set Gmail as the default email program in the Chrome browser. I still haven't figured it out. That's an absurd situation -- and does not exactly support the argument that Google ties its products together, one of the main things anti-trust types worry about.

2. Google needs some extraordinary hardware designers. Think iPad, iPod, iPhone.

Google is now competing with Apple. It cannot match the elegant design sense that Steve Jobs brings to his devices. Google should spend a lot of money to find some of these folks who are not currently working for Apple. 

The designers need to work closely with the software developers to make sure things run smoothly. Apple's design capability is the one thing that makes Jobs's vertically-integrated strategy work. But it can be done without that link. The hardware designers must make the designs available to hardware manufacturers as a gold standard, while still letting any of them create their own designs under a rigid set of guidelines. Competition will choose the best designs.

Steve Jobs does not like Google these days. What if he were to decide to ban Google apps from the iPhone or other products? It would hurt Apple users, but I can imagine Steve Jobs giving it a shot. Google needs to make sure it has some insanely great products out there in order to maintain momentum.

THEN the anti-trust folks can really start worrying.

It's Hate Google Week

I have to declare this Hate Google Week, where people from all walks of crime declare their disdain of the 'What, me evil?'  company.

Who's on the agenda so far?

Stop the Google/Admob Deal!

Sen. Herb Kohl, chairman for the subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights, wants the Federal Trade Commission to scrutinize the proposed deal.

(EWeek article to give you the facts that the Wall Street Journal article hides behind its golden firewall.)

Concern about competition. Would give Google 24 percent of mobile ad market. But since all big companies are evil, we can't let it buy anything that would let it take an independent competitor off the market.  

What happened to the days when a monopoly was not illegal unless it leverages its monopoly illegally to keep competitors out of the market? What happened to scrutiny of the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, which takes the #2 search engine out of the market? (Search Engine Land article.)

Oh, yeah, that's right. Microsoft would never try to leverage its monopoly unfairly.

Visual artists sue Google over Book scanning

(Reuters article)

Photographers, illustrators and others want to make sure nobody sees their work again. Google Books could provide them with free marketing by showing off talent that rotting away on library shelves and will never make those artists another dime. Hey, Google, you don't pay, you don't play. Maybe Google can just black out all the art work in the books it scans. Then the artists won't have to worry about it being seen again.

They want tens of thousands of dollars per infringement of each illustration, for which they were originally paid maybe $2,000, tops. Oh, now I see the motivation. Nice scam if you can get it.

Rupert Murdoch is again threatening to block Google from sending readers to his news sites

Mad-Eye Murdy tells the National Press club, "We're going to stop Google and others from taking our content!"

MarketWatch article

Taking it where, exactly? I thought Google took readers to the full article, not the other way around. Oh, well, we all know, as McMurdy says, that all news sites will charge subscriptions anyway. It's not like you can find the news anywhere else on the Internet.

More to come?

Come on, folks, we've barely scratched the Google logo here. I'm sure we could get another lawsuit or two going. 

I know! Google just updated its Maps applet for the Blackberry. (Info Week article) Let's sue Google to stop it from providing apps for mobile phone providers. That'll keep it from getting any more of a monopoly on the Internet mapping market. Then we can sue it again for damaging those smart device suppliers by making them less competitive with Android phones, thus increasing the chances of an Android monopoly.

No news sites were harmed in making this column. Except maybe the Wall Street Journal.

For further articles on Google controversies, please visit RichardLBrandt.com. You can even link to it. I won't sue.