Tag Archives: Antitrust

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Hey Siri, Ready for an Antitrust Lawsuit Against Apple? Guess Who’s Suing.

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The AI personal assistant with the “most usage” spanning  connectivity across all smart devices, will be the anchor upon which users will gravitate to control their ‘automated’ lives.  An Amazon commercial just aired which depicted  a dad with his daughter, and the daughter was crying about her boyfriend who happened to be in the front yard yelling for her.  The dad says to Amazon’s Alexa, sprinklers on, and yes, the boyfriend got soaked.

What is so special about top spot for the AI Personal Assistant? Controlling the ‘funnel’ upon which all information is accessed, and actions are taken means the intelligent ability to:

  • Serve up content / information, which could then be mixed in with advertisements, or ‘intelligent suggestions’ based on historical data, i.e. machine learning.
  • Proactive, suggestive actions  may lead to sales of goods and services. e.g. AI Personal Assistant flags potential ‘buys’ from eBay based on user profiles.

Three main sources of AI Personal Assistant value add:

  • A portal to the “outside” world; E.g. If I need information, I wouldn’t “surf the web” I would ask Cortana to go “Research” XYZ;   in the Business Intelligence / data warehousing space, a business analyst may need to run a few queries in order to get the information they wanted.  In the same token, Microsoft Cortana may come back to you several times to ask “for your guidance”
  • An abstraction layer between the user and their apps;  The user need not ‘lift a finger’ to any app outside the Personal Assistant with noted exceptions like playing a game for you.
  • User Profiles derived from the first two points; I.e. data collection on everything from spending habits, or other day to day  rituals.

Proactive and chatty assistants may win the “Assistant of Choice” on all platforms.  Being proactive means collecting data more often then when it’s just you asking questions ADHOC.  Proactive AI Personal Assistants that are Geo Aware may may make “timely appropriate interruptions”(notifications) that may be based on time and location.  E.g. “Don’t forget milk” says Siri,  as your passing the grocery store.  Around the time I leave work Google maps tells me if I have traffic and my ETA.

It’s possible for the [non-native] AI Personal Assistant to become the ‘abstract’ layer on top of ANY mobile OS (iOS, Android), and is the funnel by which all actions / requests are triggered.

Microsoft Corona has an iOS app and widget, which is wrapped around the OS.  Tighter integration may be possible but not allowed by the iOS, the iPhone, and the Apple Co. Note: Google’s Allo does not provide an iOS widget at the time of this writing.

Antitrust violation by mobile smartphone maker Apple:  iOS must allow for the ‘substitution’ of a competitive AI Personal Assistant to be triggered in the same manner as the native Siri,  “press and hold home button” capability that launches the default packaged iOS assistant Siri.
Reminiscent of the Microsoft IE Browser / OS antitrust violations in the past.

Holding the iPhone Home button brings up Siri. There should be an OS setting to swap out which Assistant is to be used with the mobile OS as the default.  Today, the iPhone / iPad iOS only supports “Siri” under the Settings menu.

ANY AI Personal assistant should be allowed to replace the default OS Personal assistant from Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana to any startup company with expertise and resources needed to build, and deploy a Personal Assistant solution.  Has Apple has taken steps to tightly couple Siri with it’s iOS?

AI Personal Assistant ‘Wish” list:

  • Interactive, Voice Menu Driven Dialog; The AI Personal Assistant should know what installed [mobile] apps exist, as well as their actionable, hierarchical taxonomy of feature / functions.   The Assistant should, for example, ask which application the user wants to use, and if not known by the user, the assistant should verbally / visually list the apps.  After the user selects the app, the Assistant should then provide a list of function choices for that application; e.g. “Press 1 for “Play Song”
    • The interactive voice menu should also provide a level of abstraction when available, e.g. User need not select the app, and just say “Create Reminder”.  There may be several applications on the Smartphone that do the same thing, such as Note Taking and Reminders.  In the OS Settings, under the soon to be NEW menu ‘ AI Personal Assistant’, a list of installed system applications compatible with this “AI Personal Assistant” service layer should be listed, and should be grouped by sets of categories defined by the Mobile OS.
  • Capability to interact with IoT using user defined workflows.  Hardware and software may exist in the Cloud.
  • Ever tighter integration with native as well as 3rd party apps, e.g. Google Allo and Google Keep.

Apple could already be making the changes as a natural course of their product evolution.  Even if the ‘big boys’ don’t want to stir up a hornet’s nest, all you need is VC and a few good programmers to pick a fight with Apple.

Business, Technology

Microsoft OS & Google Cloud Platform: Owning the Shelf Space

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Google at this phase in their business and technology life cycle reminds me of Microsoft, as the trailblazers, when Microsoft was building all their products, and continually trying to own the shelf space of product sets in their desktop platform.  Now that the tides have turned, it seems their cloud platform is growing, and Google’s growth is dominant. Not only are they building out the architecture platform, but they are filling out their shelf space, building out their platform with their products, the mantra, building out the products that fit in their platform, with a preference to build verses buy, acquiring when necessary. The parallelism with Microsoft, and the desktop in the 80s and 90s scary in it’s cyclical nature.

Although Microsoft ‘virtually’ owned, and arguably continues to dominate the desktop, thick client, although loosing ground to a diversity of platforms ever since Red Hat brought Unix popularity, and Macintosh continued to grow in it’s popularity.  Look what happened at Microsoft, lots of stock options, lots of cashing in, and eventually becoming unpopular associated with a passion for their oligopoly, or as the antitrust put it, monopoly in the market of the desktop, owning the desktop platform.  Could that now happen with Google, and will we see the stock split, and other competitive offerings occur, forced by an anti-trust case by the government?  Ouch.  Well, there is no doubt, Google’s cloud platform and product set is growing.  Good for them, and good for us as consumers.  The difference, APIs, and expandability with the Google platform.  Has Google learned the harsh lessons of Microsoft, allowing the extensibility.  Will they run into barriers with partners, upgrades to the APIs, greed, and a movement to own the shelf space.

We will see.  Google, keep your cloud APIs extendable, expose as many APIs as possible, allowing third parties to easily compete and dominate the products within your architecture, even create open source code to your own products within the cloud platform, and promote as many third party products as possible leveraging all of the APIs.

The one thing I have seen so far, which is not a great sign, is trying to incorporate 3rd party products into your cloud where you have competitive offering.  I’d like to see Google step up, for example, and create widgets to WordPress to compete with their blogging platform.  Actively look to plug in third party products into your cloud architecture, avoiding the animosity third parties might have, and there won’t be a need for anti-trust down the road.  Europe is already jumping on that train with anti-trust.  I’d devise a group within Google that looks to integrate, and partner with small to mid size companies, and proactively include them into your platform.  Don’t give anyone a reason to target Google as a monopoly.

See also the article, THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Google’s FTC Interrogation Not Analogous To Microsoft’s Antitrust History

Business, Law, SEO, Technology

When Only Money Talks in SEO & Online Advertising

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It seems to me in my last few years of experience, when you want to be heard on the Internet, you can have the best Keywords, Metadata, SEO Title, and Metadata, and your placement in the search IS only if you pay for the advertising to the company running the platform.  You actively pay for advertising, you go to the top of the list, and they tell you if you bid X you will be placed at #1 ranking. That should advance your hit rate in a calculation.  If you have a placement of 1, and a high click through rate on the search engine, that should also effect your placement in the search engine when you don’t advertise, if you have similar SEO keywords, metadata, and click through rate, because after all, the relevancy has not changed, so mathematically it should be at equilibrium.  It’s just how much you are paying that changes.  I will quote one of my favorite movies yet again, Moneyball.

Billy Beane: No! What’s the problem, Barry?
Scout Barry: We need three eight home runs, a hundred twenty R.B.I’s and forty seven…
Billy Beane: Aaahhh! The problem we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there’s fifty feet of crap, and then there’s us. It’s an unfair game… We got to think differently.”

 

People, we have to think differently, out of the box, if you want…full stop.  It’s like the Mofia is running the Advertising Online, muscling you, a shakedown for a payment to be heard, and if it only suits their political agenda to top off. We have two companies, with no disrespect, but it’s an oligopoly, essentially, Microsoft Ads Bing and Google Ads.  This is as close to anti-trust as possible, and although I think Google AdWords has an amazing platform, and in favor of both parties, because my mantra is all perspectives are valid, this is Ironic, in this case, it’s Microsoft who might have a case against Google in an Anti-trust suit, and I like them both.  Guess what, it’s a case for every single advertising agency, a class action law suit, which could even involve SEO Experts paid to help the advertisers.

Thanks goes to @JFGariepy, Sir J.-François Gariépy for sparking the idea.

Business, Finance, Politics, Technology

Is the Apple and Samsung Battle Really about Android verse iOS?

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Is this just a question of Samsung verse Apple, or iOS verse Android, but Apple is not battling the U.S. company, Google, and Google is not defending it’s partner because it has its own internally acquired hardware vendor, Motorola Mobility?

Since Samsung is a foreign company, should it be protected under United States Antitrust regulations, and if so, do they apply?  If by taking Samsung out of the U.S. marketplace, would Apple monopolize the marketplace?  Is it a grey area, the current number of mobile hardware manufacturers, relative to their share in the market, and how much control Apple would have shaping the U.S. marketplace if Samsung was removed?  Are the mobile hardware and/or OS manufactures an Oligopoly or a Monopoly?  As an example article, here is a brief statement on Monopolies and Oligopolies, and examples of Oligopolies. U.S Antitrust Laws could apply, but this decision should at least be presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, and possibly in a different context.  Is this a hardware manufacturer issue, or a mobile Operating System issue?

I continually see news articles like, Apple wants ban on Samsung products, even more damages.  Here is a solid paper from a Law student at Fordham regarding Oligopolies and Antitrust Law.  It started to make me think, along with another article from CNN Money, Android races past Apple in smartphone market share.  In the article it mentions how RIMM and Nokia / Symbian fell in market share significantly, and the top two competitors are Apple and Android.  For me, these articles raised a few questions.  Clearly RIMM and Nokia/Symbian differ in form factor and feature capabilities, and have been outpaced by Apple and Android.  Google purchasing Motorola Mobility seemed to enhance the lack of Google’s interest in backing other hardware manufacturers.  My first question is what is the difference between generic drugs and name brand drugs, and this situation, and how do Generics persist in the marketplace?  Is this battle really Android versus Apple, but Google is keeping an arm’s length because they have their own hardware manufacturer internally?  Second, are every single innovation adopted by one OS and/or hardware manufacturer, e.g. mutithreaded / multitasking support, all up for debate, fines, and closed the ability to compete in the marketplace.  This situation smells of geopolitics, and how American Capitalism marketplace may be leveraging some form of Protectionism.  Again, this case, and possibly Samsung should partner with another Android OS partner, possibly outside the U.S., to transform this case to the U.S. Supreme Court, and make this about the Operating Systems rather than hardware.