Apple is no way positioned to harm Google in any way on the longer run. In many ways Apple's products are like what video games, music albums and stereos were in the past. They are products with massive hype, craze and cult following of some kind.
Google on the other hand is a massive Innovation factory, churning innovations by the years. No body really is close to them when it comes to search, on line advertising etc. On top of that they have some of the top most properties on the internet- Mail, News, G+ etc etc.
What you are seeing now is Google really flooding market with their other innovative stuff Google TV, Android, wearable computing, self driving cars, offering peta byte scale data analytic engines etc. Engineering innovation is awesome too.
Apple cannot compete with that sort of company. Their best bet is to assume that their cult following will remain and will go gaga every time they come with a new product.
Apple may not be positioned to harm Google massively but I don't see that is really their aim.
Google clearly has done and still does some real useful innovation but I think that you are massively overstating their effectiveness on that front.
What is innovative about Google TV? The first version was a shit concept implemented badly and advertised by lunatics. I understand the second version is better but I still don't think the concept is right (I've not used the second version so it may be quite good now).
Android? I'm not saying that it isn't good or doesn't have some innovations but it isn't in a different class to iOS or even probably WinPhone. Can you explain what is really innovative about it.
Wearable computing - toy so far. Do I think that it will be turned into a mass market product in the next 5 years. My bet is no. Also IF Apple was working on such a thing they wouldn't tell the world until it was consumer ready so there isn't necessarily a lead.
On line advertising, peta byte scale data analytics - these are tools used against me as a customer (or am I the product). They are the reasons that I don't use Gmail or want an Android phone. Do I trust Google more than FB - hell yes! But they know too much already from my search patterns, maps use etc. I don't want to give them any more.
I could go down the rest of your list but it would get tedious.
It also seems to me that cult going gaga these days isn't the Apple one but the Google one. There is far more vitriol, anger and negative comments about Apple products than raving praise for them. Your post is not in that category but it shows what I perceive as an unhealthy level of reverence to Google.
Google on the other hand is a massive Innovation factory, churning innovations by the years. No body really is close to them when it comes to search, on line advertising etc.
I'm wondering a bit about search. The few times I've bothered to use e.g. Bing, I wouldn't say the search quality was noticeably worse, and the emphasis on organic over paid links was... refreshing. When I think back about my search engine switches in the past, they rarely happened because of search algorithm quality per se, but mostly because the previous search engine was getting clogged with ads. That definitely drove me away from lycos, and I seem to remember it also happened with AltaVista.
Google may be unrivaled in online advertising, but to me as a consumer, that is not necessarily a benefit.
Google on the other hand is a massive Innovation factory, churning innovations by the years. No body really is close to them when it comes to search, on line advertising etc. On top of that they have some of the top most properties on the internet- Mail, News, G+ etc etc.
What you are seeing now is Google really flooding market with their other innovative stuff Google TV, Android, wearable computing, self driving cars, offering peta byte scale data analytic engines etc. Engineering innovation is awesome too.
Apple cannot compete with that sort of company. Their best bet is to assume that their cult following will remain and will go gaga every time they come with a new product.