Google’s bitching that Microsoft Bing’s ripping off its search results.

Google:

At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we’d like for this practice to stop.

Perhaps Google should look at its own actions before criticising others. Android is one of Google’s most important products now, but it’s interesting to note how rapidly it went from being something akin to a BlackBerry to a knock-off iPhone once Apple’s device appeared. (And while Larry Page claims Google was working on Android before the iPhone arrived, Apple was working on iOS for years before, as part of the SafariPad skunk works project. Plus BlackBerry-like Android devices were what Google showed off after the iPhone was in the wild.)

Maybe Apple should say:

At Apple we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our iOS devices’ quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our iOS devices and iOS itself because we want our users to get the best experience every time they use them, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new companies in this space that are out there—with products built on core innovation, and not on recycled ideas and concepts from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant smartphone and touchscreen devices, we encourage you to come directly to Apple. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we’d like for this practice to stop.

Or maybe Google should just stop whining about others ripping it off when it does precisely the same thing itself.

The New York Post quotes analyst Ezra Gottheil:

If you want to get a device out—if you’re [a manufacturer]—do you have to go with what’s available right now or do you wait for the next generation to come out?

If you’re Apple and what’s available’s not good enough, you wait. If you’re pretty much everyone else, you don’t, and you risk releasing sub-optimal hardware, like the Galaxy Tab. Oddly, most of the market still doesn’t get this.

I wrote earlier today about an Apple/Sony spat regarding iOS app purchases. Sony’s reader app was rejected, and the internet exploded with speculation regarding what this meant. According to All Things Digital, Apple has in fact lost it. Apple spokesperson Trudy Miller says:

We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.

This suggests Kindle and similar apps must now at least offer the option of in-app purchase (which means Apple would get a 30 per cent cut). I can’t see that being tempting to Amazon—instead, I imagine Amazon will pull its app.

Me, earlier:

[This] would hand millions of potential iOS users a damn good reason to seriously consider competing platforms.

However, I would hope that Apple isn’t going down that particular road, because making an enemy of Amazon (now the owner of Lovefilm, Apple’s biggest competition in digital music, and soon to open its own Android store) would be a bad move, and if Apple attempts to enforce its own systems and effectively ban the competition, it’s going to (rightly) get smacked hard by multiple anti-competition commissions and have the kind of PR fallout even Cupertino can’t dance around.

I’ll bet they’re laughing their arses off over at Android HQ, because Apple just handed its competition a massive PR win and the tools for everyone to screech ‘open’ at the top of their voices, forever.

Broken Rules provides some interesting graphs relating to And Yet It Moves sales versus pricing on the Mac App Store, resulting in this conclusion:

In the end, we learned: the lower the price the higher the revenue.

This is also the case on the iOS store, where games like Pac-Man top the chart at 59p but vanish without a trace when they’re priced much higher. It’s baffling that the likes of Namco don’t settle on lower price-points all year round.

Mind you, even more baffling is that the Broken Rules game is currently back at $9.99, despite the company stating the following in its blog post:

[…] we quickly realized that the App Store is not a place where a $9.99 game is easily bought. Established brands might launch at this price point, but our first hours proved that we would get nowhere at $9.99. So we soon dropped the price

Now this is interesting. Andriasang reports that Sony’s PlayStation suite will move to other platforms. SCE CEO Kaz Hirai said:

We have a completely open stance. There are a variety of OSes, but we’re focusing first on Android. There’s also Windows, iOS and so forth, but we don’t have the resources to make it compatible with everything from the start.

This is a fair enough statement, although I question the business decision in aiming first for Android, when it’s clear Sony would make a killing on iOS (despite having to give up 30 per cent of payments to Apple).

Detractors will probably argue that Sony’s ‘open’ stance is an admission that its handheld ambitions (now placing the company resolutely in third place, behind Nintendo and Apple) are failing, but I think this could prove to be a shrewd and brilliant move. At worst, Sony makes a load of cash from reselling old IP, to customers who don’t have a Sony device and don’t feel compelled to buy one. At best, lapsed Sony customers may fall in love with PlayStation games all over again and seek out the current iteration of the company’s consoles. And at the worst end of ‘at worst’, it also sets up Sony to dramatically shift towards a Sega-style software-only position should it need to in the future.

Assuming by ‘open’, Sony does eventually mean ‘Android, iOS, Windows and maybe even Mac’ and not just ‘Android’, there’s nothing here but a huge win for the company.

Hat tip: iPhone Games Bulletin.