In a recent interview with Wired, the CEO Google, Larry Page, spoke about Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), and of course about the company that produces it. Page says that Apple is extremely good in only a few areas in which it is involved, but he finds this unsatisfactory, saying that there are so many opportunities in the world and companies like Google must take advantage of them to develop great products used by millions of people around the world.
You know, we always have these debates: We have all this money, we have all these people, why aren't we doing more stuff? You may say that Apple only does a very, very small number of things, and that's working pretty well for them. But I find that unsatisfying. I feel like there are all these opportunities in the world to use technology to make people's lives better. At Google we're attacking maybe 0.1 percent of that space.
Talking about iOS 6 Maps, Page claims that the failure of this service has led people to appreciate it more and more Google Maps and the effort made by Google for the development of this service. Page did not provide details about the problems the two companies had, but it is clear that Google had a lot to gain from this breakup, but the benefits are probably short-term, because the iOS 6 Maps improvement will cause users to gradually abandon Google Maps.
I don't want to comment on partner relationships. But we've been working on Maps for a long time, and it's nice to see people realize that we've put a lot of effort and investment into it. That's clearly more appreciated now.
