Since his untimely death last year (yes, it will really have been a year tomorrow), the absence of Steve Jobs has become a favorite scapegoat for Apple product failures, replacing the previous favorite scapegoat of the presence of Steve Jobs. And while tech bloggers wonder aloud whether Apple Maps would"ve been better with Steve at the helm, his anti-Google offensive could"ve been even more radical.
A new article from Business Week delves into how the absence of Jobs has affected Apple (in case you"re wondering, it"s holding its own pretty well), but also reveals that Jobs had seriously considered banning Google search from Apple products altogether. Ultimately, the idea was thrown out - for now, at least - over fears of how consumers would react to the change.
We don"t know how seriously Apple considered dumping Google search, or what it considered replacing it with (Bing? An in-house solution?), but it just goes to show how deeply Apple"s war with Google goes, and that it could be even more radical if Steve were still at the helm.
In the meantime, even though Google search is still on iDevices, don"t think that there"s been a ceasefire under Tim Cook. Apple is still aggressively locking Google out of iOS 6, highlighting competing services, and still actively considering dumping Google in regions where it isn"t as dominant as in the US or Western Europe.
Source: Business Week | via Gizmodo