When Titans Fight

Apple, Google and Amazon are the most valuable companies in the world and they’re fighting to each other. Unfortunately it’s the consumer who loses in this fight.

A few examples:

• Apple’s products are not officially available on Amazon
• Same applies to many of Google’s products
• The Nest skill on Amazon Alexa is a joke
• You can’t buy or rent Amazon Video products on their IOS or tvOS app
• Spotify is nowhere to be found on Apple TV
• YouTube doesn’t want their videos to be on the Alexa Show

The list goes on.

Remember that Google Maps app on IOS back in 2012 just had 60% of the features of the same app had on Android? It made it necessary for Apple to launch Apple Maps. It wasn’t great, but at least it had navigation. Google caught up quickly, but Apple to this day spends significant resources to keep Apple Maps alive. They have to.

All of these companies are very successful in their own domains and the anti-competitive behavior is not hurting their bottom line by much, but it’s the consumer who loses and gets inferior propositions. I also wonder how often this happens to small but successful companies who are not in a position to fight back. We certainly can do better than this.