Roger MacNamee, a venture capitalist who has invested heavily in Palm and Facebook in the past, has said that Apple is winning the battle with Google for the internet.
MacNamee, who famously said in 2009 that the days of the iPhone were numbered, reckons Apple has the upper hand with its app-focused model, whereas Google’s traditional, index-based approach is stagnating.
MacNamee, in an interview with CNBC, said that the reason for Google’s stagnation was the World Wide Web’s reliance on HTML – which “hasn’t changed for a decade”.
Apple’s app-based approach to the internet was a much more innovative one, he said, and the popularity of the iPhone and iPad meant that the Cupertino company was starting to wrest control from Google, the firm that has dominated the web for many years now.
“Right now Apple is just killing the World Wide Web. Peope are adapting iPads and iPhones at a rate. Apple will do almost 100 million units this year – I mean, the numbers are staggering,” MacNamee said.
Apple is also taking the fight to another of its tradtional rivals – Microsoft, MacNamee argues. “This is the year where Microsoft has fallen below 50 percent of internet-connected devices, down from 97 percent 10 years ago,” he said.
According to MacNamee, Windows is about to enter a cycle of decline, whereas Apple will come to the fore with the iPad 2. The success of the iPad and Apple’s app-focused approach would see the company lead a 10-year cycle of growth for the company and the technology industry as a whole, he said.
But he was cautious about the success of the iPad’s competitors, especially Android-based devices where he suggests that security is a major issue. He does, though, think that HP – which now owns Palm – has a “chance” of grabbing a share of the tablet market.