Wal-Mart, Apple, Amazon
and Google: In corporate battles, customers may be casualties
By Craig Timberg, Friday,
September 21, 8:50 AM
What do the Washington
Monument and Amazon’s Kindle Fire have in common?
Decisions by some of
America’s biggest companies — acting in their own interests, not those of their
customers — have made both harder to find.
Jia Lynn Yang SEP 20
Report shows companies use
loopholes to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes on overseas profits.
Those hoping to locate the
Washington Monument lost out in Apple’s rush to launch its own mapping app and
banish the remarkably accurate, detailed one long provided for free by Google.
The list of mapping errors
discovered as the new iPhone 5 hit the streets goes beyond the misplaced marker
honoring the first U.S. president. Chicago’s iconic Willis Tower (formerly the
Sears Tower) also was in the wrong place. So was an Apple store in Sydney.
London’s Paddington Station, meanwhile, was missing entirely, according to a
handy compilation by the Huffington Post.
What was behind this rare
misstep by one of the richest and most admired companies in history? Was it
flaws with Google’s maps that hurt Apple’s customers? No. It was Apple’s
sharpening rivalry with Google, another one of the richest and most admired
companies in history — and one that increasingly has moved into Apple’s
lucrative smartphone and computer tablet businesses.
This big strategic bet, if
it gives Apple a long-term edge over Google, may turn out to be worth this
week’s embarrassment for the company. No doubt the mapping errors are
frantically being fixed somewhere in Cupertino, Calif., home to Apple’s
headquarters, right now.
But if you are a consumer
rather than a shareholder, it’s worth pondering what the future will look like
if Apple — or Google, for that matter — comes to dominate the high-tech
industry. How often will it make business sense to banish a popular product in
hopes of gaining advantage over a competitor?
It’s a question Wal-Mart’s
customers might be asking after news that the world’s largest brick-and-mortar
retailer has decided to stop selling the Kindle Fire, a popular tablet that
happens to be made by the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon.
Again, the strategic logic
is clear: Why should Wal-Mart help Amazon peddle a device whose main goal is to
sell other stuff — including plenty of stuff, such as movies, books, and
housewares, that Wal-Mart also sells?
If there was any doubt
that the Kindle is more of an Amazon showroom than a pure computer device,
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made clear the focus on sellable content in launching
the latest line of them this month. “We want to make money when people use our
devices, not when they buy our devices,” he said.
Wal-Mart’s response makes
total sense. Unless, that is, you are a customer who happens to want to buy a
Kindle.
Comments
Post a Comment