You will not be surprised to learn that the Applefail train rolls merrily along.
“Apple Overtaken by Google in Yet Another Category” writes The Motley Fool’s Sam Mattera. (No link because of Mattera’s repeat offender status, but tip o’ the antlers to @JonyIveParody.)
ZOMGurrd, the Macalope didn’t realize there were any left!
Note that Mattera never actually says what all the other categories are.
Apple’s brand isn’t what it used to be.
You mean compared to 1996? Yeah, it’s a heck of a lot better.
Oh, that’s not what he means.
According to communications firm Millward Brown …
Which we have all heard of before and whose word we all take as … wait, who?
… Google now has the most popular brand in the world, surpassing Apple, which occupied the top spot in each of the last three years.
Google surpasses Apple in a brand survey?! Talk about red meat! NOM NOM NOM.
While this won’t affect Apple’s financial results …
Carts and horses: Which come first? And why are all my wheels covered in manure?
… particularly in the near future, it does serve to reinforce a common criticism of the company and simultaneously highlight a weakness with one of its long-standing strategies.
Doesn’t everything?
When it comes to valuation, it’s indisputable: The market expects much more from Google than Apple.
NEWSFLASH: STOCK MARKET DOES NOT UNDERSTAND APPLE. MORE ON THIS LATE-BREAKING STORY AS IT UNFOLDS OVER THE LAST 35 YEARS.
There are many potential reasons to explain this discrepancy, but Apple’s commitment to secrecy definitely plays a role.
Well, maybe it does. The secrecy also benefits the company by giving it free press.
Apple’s Tim Cook had promised new product categories across 2014, but here we are, almost halfway through the year and nothing new has been unveiled.
You can almost see Mattera sitting at his keyboard thinking, “Man, I gotta get this jab in before WWDC.”
In Millward Brown’s press release, there’s a lot of talk about how super-awesome Google is, what with the self-driving cars and Glass and wearable tech it makes, which we’re all using right now.
“Google has been hugely innovative in the last year with Google Glass, investments in artificial intelligence and a multitude of partnerships that see its Android operating system becoming embedded in other goods such as cars. All of this activity sends a very strong signal to consumers about what Google is about and it has coincided with a slowdown at Apple.”
Google is leading the race in announcements of things that aren’t actually shipping yet, that’s for sure. The Macalope finds it hard to believe that most consumers are even aware of this stuff, though.
When it comes to methodology, Millward Brown’s calculations are based partly on companies financial results and partly on consumer surveys. It’s possible that Apple’s slowed growth over the last year caused it to drop in this report; the Macalope certainly thinks that’s a more likely scenario than consumers loving Glass so much, based on how many faces wearing it got punched in the last year.
But, OK. Google came out on top in this study. Good for it. Its phone operating system is on a metric butt-ton of phones, so it should have something to show for that, besides all your data. (Although, really, all it wants is all your data.) Apple, of course, has come out on top in others and even Microsoft topped one if you can believe it.
Actually, Microsoft came out on top even if you can’t believe it.
As far as big-time announcements that make pundits all weak at the knees, next week is WWDC. Surely it will be as boring as ever.