It seems a safe bet that most of the money made by iPhone application developers will come in the form of advertising. That is the overwhelming lesson from the PC-based internet. So if Steve Jobs is right in saying that the marketplace for paid-for iPhone applications will eventually reach $1bn, how much bigger might the advertising market be?
Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, unveiled a new version of Apple’s iPhone yesterday. Unfortunately, some of the phone’s most effective marketers are not around to sell it because they have been fired. O2, the exclusive network provider for iPhone in the U.K., recently dismissed several employees for buying phones at the staff discount price and selling them over the Internet.
Eric Schmidt was doing his level best late last week not to gloat. With Microsoft dropping its attempted takeover of Yahoo, the Google chief executive had just seen his arch-rival abandon its most direct attack yet on Google’s growing dominance of online search and advertising.
Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset, adding weight to the group’s confidence at being able to generate significant revenues from the mobile Internet. If the trend continues and other handset manufacturers follow Apple’s lead in making Web access easy, the number of mobile searches will overtake fixed Internet searches within the next several years.
Jerry Yang must be starting to understand how Alfred Chuang of BEA Systems felt when Larry Ellison of Oracle came calling last year. Like Chuang, the Yahoo boss has just been landed with a takeover offer at such a big premium that he can’t possibly just ignore it. Also like Chuang, the options for other deals–or for staying independent–are shrinking fast. Here are the other partnerships or alliances that Yang could have grabbed at in the last year or so, and the chances that he can turn to them again now as he looks for an alternative to Microsoft …
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