Pam Horan, publisher of the Online Publishers Association, says the trade organization’s members — a group that includes Time Inc., Hearst, Conde Nast, Bloomberg, National Geographic and, yes, Forbes — are worried the new regime doesn’t give them the flexibility they need to serve their customers.

The flexibility to serve their customers

What does Apple do to deny publishers that “flexibility” then? One click to opt in to data sharing. Pam Horan, again:

Anything that requires the consumer to take yet another step is always going to reduce the number of people that participate in the process. It limits the ability to gather audience insights to build the right products. With this inability to know who your consumers are, it really affects the ultimate product for the consumer.

Put simply, publishers don’t want readers to opt in, because they know readers will prefer to opt out. Transparency is not a friend of publishers who for decades made a mint by selling out readers to advertisers and list brokers. Most readers may not be aware of this, but those who are don’t like it. Publishers know that and hate Apple for calling their bluff. If personal info harvesting isn’t essential for publishers’ business model and it is in the interest of readers, then why would they be against an instant referendum in the form of the opt in button?

Beyond the smokescreen

This, of course, isn’t about the readers. It’s not even about Apple’s App Store. It’s about the clash of two different business models. One that sells the customer to the highest bidder through a product and the other that sells a product directly to the customer. For the former, the product is a vehicle, often an excuse, since it holds no value for the publisher. For the latter, the product is the source of value, it lives and dies by the utility and delight it brings to the customer.

Transitioning from one format or platform to a new one is often a long, arduous and financially disruptive process. Lately, however, we are seeing a time compression in these transitions. For example, moving from dial-up to broadband or from landlines to wireless took quite a bit of time. Transition from analog to digital music or from featurephones to smartphones have been much shorter. Shorter the transition, bloodier the financial impact on incumbents. Print economics have been around forever, virtually unchanged for decades. All of a sudden, though, there is an incredibly convenient format (iPad) and a platform (iTunes) for what used to live in the dead-tree zone. No wonder we have publishers up in arms about the freight train suddenly in front of them.

The grand opening

We can also look at the new App Store rules as a grand negotiation being conducted in public. Apple’s iTunes and iOS ecosystem make it abundantly clear that there’s now a platform ready for transition. Table stakes: 30% cut for the platform owner. Publishers have several choices:

1. Set up their own stores — If the most business savvy of all publishers, Rupert Murdoch, who never shied away from big and expensive bets, has come to the conclusion that News Corp alone can’t set up its own independent online store, what chance do other smaller, cash-strapped, technophobic publishers have?

2. Collude to set up a BigPublishers-only store — This would be standard operating procedure…that has repeatedly failed. Disparate corporations banding together against a successful market leader nearly always fails. Witness myriad roadkill behind iTunes.

3. Negotiate with Apple directly — Murdoch did negotiate with Apple separately, but may not have received much in return other than some technical help and launch presence. Companies like Amazon and Netflix may try to negotiate with Apple directly to leverage their popularity to wring some concessions on rules or rates.

4. Wage guerilla warfare against Apple in the press — Adobe, Part Deux. This is inevitable since many of those who produce the anti-Apple hysteria write for the publications that would financially benefit from a change in App Store policies.

5. Ask for government help — Publishers will likely ask the government to intervene and conduct a threatening investigation of App Store policies to browbeat Apple into changing its policies. Also, as the last refuge of scoundrels, they will appeal to the Congress for tax payer support under the guise of saving jobs.

6. Give up subscriptions — Google would love publishers to just give up the notion of subscriptions and go ads-only, either as free apps supported by AdMob on mobiles or browser based apps supported by AdSense. Sadly, content providers aren’t immune to making monumentally stupid mistakes and…imploding.

7. Accept Apple’s terms — We heard similar, if not identical, complaints about the size of Apple’s cut or its intermediary position between content owners and customers at the onset of iTunes and later App Store. Nobody’s complaining much about those anymore, mostly because there have been no credible alternatives.

8. Create alternatives to iTunes/iOS — This is the perennial Plan B, if Apple doesn’t budge. The usual suspects are those with a store and the will to spend money liberally to undermine Apple, namely Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Google recently transferred its upcoming music store to Andy Rubin’s Android division and is now negotiating with publishers. Microsoft rolled Nokia’s Ovi into its own store and would be happy to bankroll publishers to attract Windows Phone users. Amazon has already tangled with Apple last year after the introduction of iBooks over the agency model Apple offered to publishers. These are all big competitive players with plenty of cash to render as absurd any notion that Apple somehow has a monopoly over digital stores. It is, however, a reminder that all such previous attempts to cut down Apple by direct competition has failed.

Rock and a hard place

Apple, the one company that makes bet-the-company type moves all the time, has done it again: they have decided to cull parasitic middlemen and aggregators from the ecosystem. What choice do publishers have then? They first have to ask themselves two fundamental questions:

1. What business are we in? — Are we in the business of creating scarcity in news and media to leverage it against eyeballs for advertisers? Can our current model survive the transition to digital? Are we capable of setting up our own stores? If not, do we understand we must change our revenue streams radically? What sorts of structural and financial remodeling do we have to undergo internally to adjust to giving up 30% to Apple?

2. Quo vadis? — If our current distribution has to change, on whose digital platform will we move? Is there, in other words, an alternative to Apple App Store?

Whatever conclusions the publishing industry may arrive at, there’s one undeniable fact staring them in the face:

By next year, Apple iTunes/iOS ecosystem will have over 200 million of the most lucrative online demographics ever assembled by a company.

Apple didn’t become the world’s most valued tech company by being naive. The fact that Apple’s longstanding discipline of selling products direct to customers aligns nicely with customers’ interests of accessing a well curated, efficient, price-competitive, easy-to-use store is just the icing on the cake. Nobody else comes close. You can’t do business by ignoring the App Store.

¶

UPDATE: In case there was any doubt that Google would step in to exploit the situation, the company introduced in less than a day after Apple’s announcement its own One Pass subscription payment plan, with a 10% cut. Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “We aren’t in this to make money, Google makes money in other ways.”

On the same continuum, however, there have been moves made by Apple that were universally seen as shortsighted and even fatal at the time they were introduced, but turned out to be nothing short of brilliant. In hindsight, for example, Apple’s refusal to “open up” iTunes by licensing its FairPlay DRM to its rivals as well as its steadfast rejection of other DRM platforms notably from Microsoft and Real was a bet-the-company type move that had no shortage of extremely vocal critics. In under a decade, iTunes has become the world’s largest and most lucrative digital media platform.

Today’s episode in the continuing saga of “Apple’s evil” is the rejection of Sony eReader app from the App Store. This controversy, too, boils down to: “Why doesn’t Apple just publish a clear declaration of what it will and won’t allow in the App Store.” The subterranean accusation here is that Apple is arbitrary, capricious and abusive of its ecosystem partners.

Crystal ball

For any single iOS developer or company, it would certainly be best if everything was spelled out and stayed unchanged. Unfortunately, while Apple is the largest technology company in the world and one of the most nimble, it can’t foresee everything. About 65% of all Apple’s sales now come from iOS devices that didn’t even exist over three years ago.

This is not a problem just for Apple: Joost and Hulu were both derided at their launch. The former is practically gone but the latter has become an overnight success. In turn, Hulu is now so vitally threatened by Netflix that it’s contemplating changing its entire business model. Of course, Netflix is likely not amused by Amazon getting ready to stream movies at discount. All this, inside a couple of years. Sustaining large-scale platforms is a very dicey proposition given the breakneck speed of change.

Just as I can’t see how Apple could have become a $300+ billion company by making iTunes an “open for all” playground of its competitors’ commercial interests — given Google, Microsoft, Adobe, RIM, Samsung, Nokia, TimeWarner, NBC, Universal, Amazon and a host of other competitors suing or attacking Apple on a daily basis — I can’t see a way for the App Store to prosper by turning itself into a “neutral zone” app and media hosting platform.

Who’s your daddy?

Why then should Apple subsidize companies like Sony to park a free app in the App Store as a simple conduit to sell their own properties outside of the App Store? Some would argue that the mere presence of such apps enhances the value of the App Store which then sells more iOS hardware devices where most of Apple’s profit comes from. By that logic, unfortunately, Time Warner could also give away and heavily promote a free app in the App Store that whisks away iOS users to various Time Warner properties to purchase music, videos, movies, books and magazines. Apple gets nothing for footing the App Store platform expenses while Time Warner gets to leech on the huge Apple ecosystem for free. Now multiply this by thousands of other companies bypassing Apple’s cut, and see how attractive App Store becomes for Apple.

The App Store value proposition is simple: 30% of transactions done via an app go to Apple and in-app purchases is the method. That figure may change one day — lowered for certain media or split for app and in-app purchases at different rates — but not until there’s a better and more lucrative online store elsewhere. That day isn’t now. Obviously, if companies like Sony or Time Warner could build their own profitable media stores (not that they don’t try repeatedly) they wouldn’t even need the App Store to begin with. So who has the upper hand here?

The line in the water

Of course, there is a balance. Without sufficient and competitive content, the App Store would fail to ignite iOS device sales. Strategically, however, all the App Store controversy to date has not dampened the enthusiasm of app submissions or iOS device sales, which Apple can’t manufacture enough of. Digiterati teeth gnashing hasn’t been reflected in actual sales figures appreciably.

No lawyer worth his BMW would advise Apple to spell out precisely what is and isn’t permissible on the App Store. Any such prohibition would essentially pre-announce verticals or platform extensions Apple itself may be thinking of developing and, conversely, the lack of any such off-limits would prematurely handicap Apple.

Some people would like Apple to offer variable or different rates of commission based on media. That may sound reasonable at first, but what if apps in one category start arbitraging price, cross sell other vendors’ wares at a lower cut and keep the difference? What if clever developers come up with forms of transactions without downloads, conventional in-app purchases or even pinging servers by, say, converting QR Codes on physical media to real or virtual money? Should Apple spend resources to try to anticipate and police these potentialities? What if Apple is planning to bridge physical and virtual worlds in its upcoming iOS devices through its own NFC-aided payment infrastructure which may alter its 30% cut policy? Should Apple have disclosed this a year ago via its App Store rules?

Technology changes. Competitors change. Regulations change. Markets change. User preferences change. Apple’s needs change. A precise codification of what is and what isn’t permissible in the App Store at any given time period is thus neither practical nor beneficial, for Apple. App Store policies need ambiguity to keep pace and adapt. This is not Android, and Apple’s not stupid. After all, on the eve of its long-awaited entry into games, it was Google that just kicked out from the Android Marketplace the popular Kongregate Arcade app that allows downloading of — of all things — Flash games.

I know where I personally come out in this fight. I much prefer a “web-centric handheld world” to a “proprietary app centric universe”. And that’s why I carry a Google phone instead of an iPhone. For me, it’s a political statement as much as anything else.

I had previously explained why Wilson missed the boat on Flash in Does “A VC” have a blind spot for Apple? and most recently touched upon the business reasons why he is so bothered about Apple’s ecosystem in The Unbearable Inevitability of Being Android, 1995.

The reason why I’m referencing Wilson here is because he’s a prominent member of the anti-app brigade whose crusades are often camouflaged anti-Apple campaigns. The hit-man for the brigade is ex-Microsoft chief evangelist and current Google engineering VP, Vic Gundotra, who told us in 2009:

“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

Likewise, Wilson believes mobile is an extension of the non-mobile web and the same rules of monetization should apply there:

I’ve been saying for a while now that I think mobile economics will trend toward web economics as the mobile web goes mainstream. In other words, the business models that work best on the web will ultimately work best in mobile. The corollary to that is that the business models that don’t work well on the web will not work well in mobile in the long run.

Given the nature of his investment portfolio this appears to make sense, at least to Wilson. Throughout all this, the one entity Wilson always cites and one that has become true north for him has been in general Google and in particular Android, the land of the “open”, living in a browser, same everywhere, without constraints…indeed a monopoly of business opportunity for one and all.

Now comes Google, according to Wall Street Journal in Google Searches for Mobile-App Experts, that is about to zig big time from true north:

Google Inc. plans to hire dozens of software developers to create applications for smartphones and other mobile devices, people familiar with the matter said, a new strategy aimed partly at helping Google counter Apple Inc. in one of high tech’s hottest sectors.

Google also has reason to try to spur quality, not just quantity, since getting hit apps first can drive demand for operating systems and devices. Some of the apps developed by Google’s new effort may be available only for Android, the people familiar with the matter said. The adoption of Android also helps ensure that Google’s search engine, the principal revenue source for the company, and other Google services are prominent on mobile devices.

The Google effort coincides with a rush by thousands of Internet professionals and college graduates to quit safe, salaried jobs to try their hand at mobile apps.

In a nutshell, Google, one of the most opportunistic web companies on the planet and Wilson’s true north, has seen the light, recognized the centrality of mobile apps and decided to join the revolution. If it’s taken Google 300,000+ apps and 10 billion downloads to see the light, I don’t know how long it might take Wilson to change his anti-app tune and re-calibrate his portfolio.

There have been myopic rebuttals from the Flash amen corner, as expected. But no need here to go into why Google’s done it, as I’ve been chronicling Google’s growing hypocrisy as a necessary result of its chosen business model for many months now.

I’d like to add one question to Gruber’s list and it’s a simple one. Given that

• Apple will have well over 200 million iOS devices and 175 million iTunes account holders with credit cards by 2012
• Apple’s iTunes ecosystem is likely the most profitable commercial online demographics ever aggregated, with sustained, proven buying habits and the least purchasing friction
• Apple will not add WebM hardware support to iOS devices (surely, not without some major Google payoff)

Google’s board should ask the current management this very simple question:

Can Google afford to write off the iOS ecosystem?

If the answer is negative, and there are no other Google shoes to drop, then this was a monumentally shortsighted move.

Android devices aren’t clones of iOS devices.

Also:

1. Apple’s greatest product is hype.
2. Apple iOS devices are expensive.
3. Apple is closed.
4. Apple is evil.

Let’s meet this week’s crusaders: Seth Weintraub (2011 will be the year Android explodes) and Fred Wilson (The Smartphone Explosion).

Seth is the current commander of the “Google 24/7″ column at Fortune and a former IT manager. ‘Nuff said.

Fred is a VC. His business is mostly about scale, with a portfolio full of companies whose lucrative exits are predicated on having scale for commensurate multiples: Etsy, Zynga, Tumblr, Twitter, Foursquare, Disqus, etc. Unlike angel investors who prefer flipping smaller properties to larger acquirers in a short period at smaller multiples, VCs like Fred’s USV need hits, at least a few big hits to justify significant management fees, bigger funds, longer incubation times and higher expectations. No place for the Apple ecosystem in Fred’s portfolio. Nothing wrong with that, this is America. Neither is there anything wrong with “fearing and loathing” Apple and declaring it “evil” so long as we understand where that angst is coming from.

Fear and loathing in Googlistan

Even though he personally uses Apple products, Fred has no use for Apple as an investor. To him, the Apple ecosystem is not “open” enough for his portfolio companies to reach sufficient scale for lucrative exits. In fact, it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say Google’s business model for Android Fred prefers is diametrically opposed to Apple’s.

As business models go, there are currently two dominant ones: either people like your product enough to purchase it or they don’t care enough to buy it but will overlook its deficiencies if it’s “free” in exchange for their personal browsing and purchasing info sold to advertisers. The former model is Apple’s, the latter is Google’s.

Apple sells emotional experiences. The price is what users pay to be delighted by Apple’s stream of innovations and to be free of the lowest common denominator burdens and the pervasive harvesting of their personal info.

Google sells eyeballs. To be more precise, the clickstream attached to those eyeballs. Thus scale, indeed dominance, is absolutely crucial to Google’s model.

The weight of scale

Android may be a lackluster clone of iOS in terms of UI and fluidity, but as an economic proposition it’s nothing short of an extension of Google’s desktop/online business model. Google’s model wouldn’t work with something like 20% market share. If a market is highly fractured among smaller players, business models like Google’s that rely on massive scale wouldn’t work well. As with Microsoft’s Win32 API or Office formats, scale is erected to beget inevitability. Inevitability becomes its own marketing engine. Windows had virtually no security architecture by design for so many years, even long after its costly effects became obvious globally, but because it was ubiquitous, thought to be irreplaceable and thus inevitable, it has continued to net Microsoft billions year after year. Likewise, MS Word could get away with some of the most insane formatting problems ever invented by man only because it has so dominated “desktop productivity apps” that it’s become inevitable. If anyone, even Microsoft, were to design a modern word processor today, it sure wouldn’t be Word. And yet everyone else designing a better Word has had a very difficult time of competing with the inevitable. Inevitability is the Kerberos of profitability.

Like Microsoft, Google doesn’t sell best-of-class user experiences to paying customers. It sells their eyeballs to advertisers. The more eyeballs, the better. The most, the best. If it can dominate a market and thus make its products and platforms inevitable, it wouldn’t even have to care about user experience at all. Google Buzz didn’t have to have good user experience because Google management thought if they could just bolt it on top of the very dominant Gmail it would make Buzz…inevitable.

In Fragmandroid: Google’s mad dash to Microsoftdom a year ago, I looked at the undeniable similarities between the two companies’ willingness to raise their paranoia to a level of corporate survival strategy:

During its growth period, Microsoft entered into one risky bet after another, from cable TV to office equipment automation to Dick Tracy watches. It saw threats to its core revenue base from every new development, every new player to come along. And expand and spend it did. It did, mostly because its management thought it could.

So Google too has to be everywhere software could possibly run: wikis, cars, windmills, electric meters, audio ads, location-based services, microblogging, catalogs, print ads, web page layout apps, online answers, social networks…even when, as you may have noticed from the list, it fails to get any traction.

For Google, nearly all of whose profits depend on advertising revenue, dominance expressed as clickstream traffic is the currency. To maintain that dominance the “Don’t Be Evil” company has been willing to go into business in China despite all evidence of rampant human rights violations, get into bed with the worst phone carrier to rape net neutrality, let its “walled backlot” search become a cesspool of SEO swindlers, collect unauthorized data via illegal WiFi mapping all over the globe, risk exposing private email account data in hopes of capturing social graph info by default, favor its own properties in search results in surreptitious ways and so on.

Whether it’s on the desktop, mobile or TV, the ability to sell advertising by maintaining market dominance is everything to Google. But then what’s in it for Google’s Android hardware “partners”?

Bondage

What happens when one company ties its market destiny to another’s rate of innovation? The movie “One OS, Many Partners” that we’ve seen before in Wintel theaters didn’t have a happy ending. Having secured a very fat market dominance, Microsoft displayed an embarrassing level of paternal indifference and inability to innovate.

Even Microsoft’s biggest partners complained: Acer about lack of proper tablet OS support, Dell about better server support against Linux, HP about media center innovation and nearly everyone about getting burned by the WMP/PlaysForSure/Zune debacle. At the end of its inevitability run, most of the Microsoft “partners” were left holding the bag…of stalled innovation, disappearing margins and market irrelevance. That’s the leitmotiv of the “One OS, Many Partners” screenplay.

It’s a classic dominance play, and Google is perfecting it in its rerun. For years, Google played deaf to complaints from publishers and studios about its copyright violations of their books, news and video. Until, of course, its own operations scaled enough to dominate those distribution channels to then dictate terms to content owners: “You can’t live without our traffic to your website, so let Google commoditize and leverage your properties for next to nothing.” Just like the Wintel hardware manufacturers who had no OS of their own and were thus at the mercy of Microsoft, content providers that stood by and never developed their own digital platforms find themselves now at the mercy of a dominant Google. This inevitability is worth so much more to Google that the several hundred million dollars it has already spent on Android to give it away for “free” remains a rounding error on its balance sheet.

Between Android’s market dominance and overwhelming commoditization of mobile content, stand Apple’s iOS devices and Facebook (and perhaps to a lesser extent Microsoft and Twitter). On these platforms, Google search – the key to dominance and inevitability – is either absent, highly mediated, in decline or mostly obviated. That’s why Google’s most belligerent words and actions have recently been directed towards those two companies. In a reversed mirror-effect, Microsoft used to call open source an anti-capitalist “cancer” then, Google’s Android head likens “un-open” Apple to North Korea today. Google loves to index Facebook social graph data, but won’t let Facebook access Gmail relationship graph – of course, all in the name of “openness”.

One company. One OS. One explosion.

So the Android crusaders will be circling us in 2011, swinging their $85 smartswords to demand our capitulation in a rapture of inevitability. Inevitable like Knoll, Orkut, Froogle, Lively, Health, NoteBook, SideWiki, Answers, Wave, Buzz, Nexus…like an army of 41 shades of blue. No matter. Resistance is futile.

Curiously, even the most successful Android hardware manufacturers like Samsung and HTC are hedging their bets on Google’s mobile platform either with their own OS (Bada) or Microsoft’s (WP7). Why would experienced OEMs hedge their bets on Android if it were so open, so free and so benevolent? Let’s hope they too have seen the “One OS, Many Partners” movie and still remember the OEM extras with un-speaking roles in the “Razor Thin Margins” and “Race to the Bottom” scenes…when everything exploded.

Update: Incidentally, none other than Vic Gundotra, former Microsoft chief evangelist and current Google engineering VP and hit-man for mobile and social, echoes precisely the strategy outlined above that Google has been using: ”It’s an art to create a sense of inevitability,” reports BusinessWeek:

In Silicon Valley, that kind of evangelism usually involves firing insults at the competition. While that hasn’t typically been Google’s style, Gundotra hasn’t shied away. As he says, “It’s an art to create a sense of inevitability.” In a keynote speech at a Google event for developers last year, he even took aim at Steve Jobs and “a draconian future where one man, one company, and one device would be our only choice. … That’s a future we don’t want.”

Kontra genuinely loathes Google right down to the ground.

This, incredibly, is the same man who started his Google “evangelism” gig with the words “I hate it” referring to Apple and its App Store policies. In his new Corporations and Emotions post, he says I hate him essentially because I hate his employer, Google.

I know it’s a currently popular meme, but what’s with all this “hating” business? I neither hate Bray nor his employer. What I wrote speaks for itself, so I see no need to explain anything further, but just in case he’s not familiar with the history of this blog, though, I have covered and praised Google on many occasions in this space, on Twitter and elsewhere: Google shows Microsoft how to connect the dots, to cite one example.

Mine isn’t anthropomorphized corporate enmity. It’s simply exposing deliberate, pervasive and sustained hypocrisy. An example of a search and ad monopolist trying to misdirect public attention away from its own proprietary and opaque cashcows by an obsessive use of the “open” mantra. If Bray dismisses that as “hating” Google, so be it.

Bray is quick to reassure us about Google:

I can testify with some force that at Google there is a notable lack of conspiratorial intent to Do Bad Things With All That Data, but then you might choose to discount that testimony because of the logo on my paycheck.

For a high visibility person who gets paid specifically to promote his company to claim he doesn’t agree with major policies of his employer would be an unacceptable ruse. So let’s briefly consider, not Bray’s necessarily biased opinion of his employer, but public statements by notable Googlers. Because in the Googleplex alternate reality:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, on CNBC never said: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Google’s European competition counsel Julia Holtz never said: “If someone forced us to [disclose how our search advertising business works], it would destroy our product.”

Google SVP, Product Management Jonathan, Rosenberg, never said: “In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to ‘game’ our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone.”

Google CEO Erich Schmidt, at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, never said: “Would you prefer someone else?…Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?” when asked why we should trust Google with all the data it collects on us.

Google CEO Erich Schmidt never blamed users for the Google Buzz privacy fiasco : “I would say that we did not understand how to communicate Google Buzz and its privacy…There was a lot of confusion when it came out on Tuesday, and people thought that somehow we were publishing their email addresses and private information, which was not true. I think it was our fault that we did not communicate that fact very well, but the important thing is that no really bad stuff happens in the sense that nobody’s personal information was disclosed.”

Google never denied and, when caught red handed, never admitted to snooping WiFi data either.

And so on.

Apparently, I “hate” Google since I criticized it, but obviously Google is not in the business of “hating” others like Apple because:

Google VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra never raised the prospect of Apple as Big Brother: “If Google didn’t act, it faced a draconian future where one man, one phone, one carrier were our choice…That’s a future we don’t want.”

Google VP of Engineering and head of Android, Andy Rubin never compared Apple to a totalitarian regime:
“When they can’t have something, people do care. Look at the way politics work. I just don’t want to live in North Korea.”

And, of course, Tim Bray never started his career at Google by “hating” Apple, as his first public pronouncement.

Clearly, there’s no pattern of hypocrisy here. The problem is me, not Google. I’m “hiding behind [an] (albeit stylish) alias” and I’m an “anomaly,” as Bray puts it. Declaring opponents as being emotional, irrational fanboys, crippled by hate is a classic tactic of marginalization. Yes, it’s all my fault, I really should just let the Tim Brays, Andy Rubins and Vic Gundotras of this world convince everyone what’s good for Google is good for America.

P.S. I don’t work for Apple and never did, but a bit of gratuitous advice to Tim Bray by way of paraphrasing Steve Jobs: “For Google to win, it doesn’t need to demonize Apple.”

That company was Placebase, as described by its CEO Jaron Waldman in this video two years ago:

Map-tile checkers game

Most Cupertino watchers saw in Apple’s Placebase acquisition an opportunity to kick another Google property off its mobile devices. Unfortunately, Placebase is a dataset integrator over maps, not a provider of actual map tiles, of which there are only a few independent ones left in the world.

In 2007, for example, Nokia bought Navteq for $8.1 billion and TomTom paid Tele Atlas NV €2.6 billion in 2008. Mobile being the next frontier in mapping, Yahoo and Nokia announced yesterday a partnership where Navteq will provide Yahoo’s map and navigation services globally. Despite all this market activity, the most popular service still remains Google Maps.

While Google Maps was squarely aimed at consumers at its introduction in 2005, Placebase took a different route by integrating public and private datasets over data tiles targeting more sophisticated business applications. Waldman told GigaOm two years ago:

Google Maps is great for consumer usage, but we are making it easy for large companies to take our Maps API, customize it and then use it. We are being used for real estate, fleet tracking and traffic.

One of those white-label partners that used Pushpin APIs was PolicyMap, which has a great demo section showing how Placebase layers datasets over maps:

Mapping the battle

Google’s declaration of war across Apple’s entire product line on the eve of WWDC and Apple’s rejection of Google Latitude location-aware mobile map app from the App Store last year sets the stage for a number of intriguing possibilities for how Apple might use Placebase:

1. Apple may swap out Google from its Maps app on iPhones/iPads with another map data provider. There have been persistent rumors about Apple and Microsoft negotiating Bing search and map data services. (Google Maps does have some serious accuracy issues which the company will attempt to correct in a year-long effort starting this summer). While Google-to-Microsoft switch is somewhat unlikely in that Apple has already invested quite a bit of time integrating Google map services and renewed that effort with even better integration in the recently shipping iPads, all that was before the virulent anti-Apple crusade displayed at Google’s I/O developer conference last week.
2. Apple also has the option of getting map tiles from other companies like MapQuest, the granddaddy of mapping services now owned by AOL or even the outright purchase of a map/navigation company like TomTom, as a low-ROI but defensive move. Placebase layers on top of raw map-data would abstract a new underlying service so that users may not even notice it (unless, of course, there are performance, accuracy or capability issues). Still, like online search, it’s not that easy to swap out a popular Google service without an equal or better one.
3. Apple may continue to get Google map tiles over which it can graft increasingly more sophisticated and useful location services through the Placebase services. This would further differentiate Apple’s Maps app from Google offerings on Android and buy Apple more time to figure out how to disentangle itself from its Google dependencies.
4. Perhaps Apple’s interest in Placebase was narrower and it simply bought talent to implement ancillary services like its Places features in iPhoto, iMovie, Aperture and potentially new apps yet to be introduced.
5. Apple may have bought Placebase for its APIs which it may announce as part of an extended iPhone OS 4 framework next week at WWDC or later. This would give both Apple and App Store developers pervasive ability to integrate map/location services in a broad range of applications from advertising to marketing to analytics to social games. Rumored social networking apps like iGroups that recently surfaced in patents indicates Apple may indeed be getting serious about location-based infrastructure.
6. Apple already has several patents covering macro-level location-based advertising/marketing and micro-level Near Field Computing exchange of identity/financial data for secure, instant and paperless payments. Placebase APIs could act as the visual underpinnings for the discovery of such services.
7. Let’s also remember that Apple recently bought Siri which provides a dynamic framework to parse text and voice, breaking it down to actionable components to form complex searches from participating data providers. Spoken queries like “I want to see {A} nearby {B} only if it has {C}” can become far more intelligent if Siri and Placebase can neatly interweave to search/navigate/notify over Placebase data layers and use the familiar map interface for display.

Digital maps, once a wondrous novelty that started with Google Maps on the desktop, are no longer a mere destination app on mobile devices. Mapping frameworks are beginning to be tightly integrated at the OS level and maps are becoming primary UI conduits to ever more sophisticated location-based services. Apple’s acquisition of Placebase was an affirmation of that reality and, hopefully, we’ll get to see the early results next week.

Netherlands-based Layar is one of the better known ‘augmented reality’ mobile browsers that started out on Android. You can also find it the Apple App Store. Layar CEO Raimo van der Klein, however, isn’t a fan of Apple or AAPL.

From Raimo’s recent Twitter stream, following the Apple-bashing opening at Google’s I/O developer conference:

The next day, taking it up a notch:

Here we have a curious case of a CEO of an “App Store developer” literally advising people on Twitter to dump their Apple stock (on a day where AAPL gained $4.56/1.92% to $242.32). Raimo isn’t sure how or if Apple will survive the year, given his giddy outlook on the just-announced Google/Android news.

Clearly, Raimo has a right to hold his opinions and to try to short Apple’s stock in his own way. It’s also pretty obvious where he thinks the future of mobile apps is. He is a cross-platform developer, with no allegiance to an ecosystem which feeds him and his company.

When Apple looks after its own and its customers’ interests by essentially saying if you want to play in our garden you need to play with our tools and rules (think section 3.3.1), it’s branded as evil. When cross-platform developers display such naked disregard and active hostility towards Apple and its financial welfare that makes the App Store possible, what do we think about their mercenary attitude?

What should we think of Apple-bashing App Store developers?

“What’s revolutionary about the iPad is the experience that it delivers: The iPad is a new kind of PC that ushers in an era of Curated Computing.“

Not unexpectedly, this drew the attention of the anti-Apple echosystem that regards the Cupertino company as the evil incarnate who’s hellbent on destroying the “open web” by curating its users’ experience on Apple devices.

Taking the baton of anti-Apple venom from Adobe’s Lee (Go screw yourself Apple) Brimelow, Google’s newest evangelist Tim (I hate, hate Apple) Bray responded to Forrester’s “Curated Computing” notion with élan:

I shudder to the core.

In a series of tweets on Twitter, Bray piled on Apple with escalating snarkiness. Let’s review his misdirections away from Google’s own sins:

Curated computing: Who needs complexity?

Exactly, who needs complexity? Who does need complexity other than those who profit from mediating its ill effects on consumers? Who, for example, needs Byzantine complexity purposely injected into our legal, tax or health care systems? Who profits from the shameful complexity of our IT universe? Who benefits from the anti-virus industry? Who profits from the complexity of Facebook’s privacy settings, Oracle’s pricing structure or Microsoft’s SharePoint hairball? Who needs the complexity of users being forced to navigate through six different Android OS versions against a permutation of dozens and dozens of carriers, handset manufacturers and devices? Google would like you to believe users are craving for this complexity, just as Microsoft tried to convince you for the last two decades.

[John @gruber answers @timbray: I think this one actually nails it: "Curated computing: Who needs complexity?" Many use cases where we *don't* need complexity. Tim Bray responds:]

Agreed, many indeed, but freedom is too high a price.

Freedom? Whose freedom? The freedom of those who directly profit from the artificial complexity to continue as they please or the freedom of users who are being taxed by these parasites? Let’s ignore the absurdity of equating Apple’s banning of proprietary Flash with the abrogation of, say, the First Amendment, a real freedom.

Curated computing: Don’t bother your pretty little head, we’ll take care of what you see.

Just like Google telling the rest of the world: “If someone forced us to [disclose how our search advertising business works], it would destroy our product.” This from a company that’s currently being investigated by the European Commission for antitrust ramifications of its opaque search ranking algorithms and the resulting 90% monopolistic share of the European search market. Google knows best.

Curated computing: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Let’s open that curtain a bit. Here’s what Bray’s bosses and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page said in their The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine a few years ago:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

It could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

It’s not as if, a decade later, the rest of the world can see what’s behind Google’s perfectly opaque and proprietary search and advertising curtain, is it? Can you say “link farms”and SEO? Do you really know what exactly Google does with your click-stream history? Did you know Google has been snooping on European WiFi transmissions until a few days ago even though the company denied it previously? Do you really know what the man behind the curtain is doing?

Curated computing: Admire the beautiful murals on the garden walls.

Or you can go “out there” to admire the graffiti on the…ground? In Google’s walled garden of advertising, for example, “cougars and cubs are out, but sugar daddies and sugar babies are in.” Google “will take care of” your sexual proclivities.

Curated computing: Freedom is over-rated.

So are utopias.

I, for one, welcome our new curatorial overlords.

Of course, no mention of our current overloads: complexity merchants.

Curated computing: What they have right now in China.

And what they also had in China just a few years ago when Bray’s employer Google went in three-monkey style to conduct commerce, despite all manner of people pleading the overlord of search/ad business not to.

Curated computing: Just fine if you’re the curator.

Google should know, its share of the search market hovers around 65-70% and its U.S. search advertising share is over 75%. If you’re the sole “curator” of AdSense/AdWords things should be just fine.

Curated computing: Your gated-exurban-community home on the Internet.

Perhaps the most pernicious proposition of the “everything must be open” crusade is the notion that curation is bad and anti-freedom. Soldiers of this crusade confuse freedom with competition. Our museums are not football-field sized warehouses where art objects are indiscriminately dumped and our magazines and blogs are not amorphous containers of randomly selected articles. Our classrooms, restaurants, hospitals and indeed all our civilized institutions are firmly reliant on curation of one kind or another. The goal should be for curators to compete, not for curation to be declared illegal and unholy by the “open” zealots.

Who’s behind the curtain?

Just as Adobe is desperately trying to yell at the world, “Don’t buy into Apple’s walled garden, get locked into our own proprietary Flash,” so is Google trying to misdirect consumers’ attention from its own monopolistic sins to Apple’s mobile platform where 100 million users voted with their own money to enjoy 200,000 apps. The evil man behind the curtain in this scenario is not Apple’s curation, it’s the frightening prospect of Google getting cut off from search and ad revenue derived from its naked domination of the search box on top of your web browser. That, unfortunately, doesn’t sound like an appealing public cry, hence the “Curated Computing” misdirection whining.