Amazon vs Google: The Tech Cold War
Amazon, the Seattle tech giant and Google, the Silicon Valley giant are the biggest rivalries in the tech market. Amazon revenue is whooping 136 billion USD which is quite higher than the Google’s 90 billion USD. The cold war culminated in a new form in 2014 when Amazon’s Android app was removed from Google Play Store. It came in response to Amazon’s direct download of the app without using Google Play Store. Although both tech giants handle entirely different businesses: Google being search and advertising while Amazon being e-commerce, competition is almost inevitable as many of their services happen to overlap, like both offer cloud storage and sell digital content like music, e-books as well as devices like smartphones.
There is an exponential increase in entrepreneurs all over the world. Amazon Machine learning is a platform to provide the developers the tool for generating machine learning models and predict from analyzing the models. Similar to this Google has its own analytics Google API and they are present in the market much before Amazon ML. This Machine learning platform makes them a much more easy process to build smart apps which use powerful algorithms to generate ML models and with the help of these models we can easily generate predictions for the application saving a huge amount of time and infrastructure. Developers can easily keep track of emails, feedback, ratings and much more. It will also suggest changes in the apps to make them successful and even inform the concerned department of the company.
The tech devices are getting smaller and smaller day by day. Now mobile TV and video streaming are the new and popular sources of entertainment. Google became the leader in the market after it bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion. There are 81941760 videos on YouTube that in a total of 819417600 hours of video means it would take staggering 93k years to go through the videos. Amazon has its Video Direct concept against the YouTube where users can watch and upload videos for free. There is also a paid version for both the darlings of Seattle and Silicon Valley. Amazon recently launched its Prime service in India which provides the customers with privileges such as movies and TV streaming, millions of eBooks and faster deliveries on their Amazon orders and some other additional facilities.
Both have their video streaming facilities: Google has Netflix and Amazon has Instant Video but Instant Video service is not compatible with Google devices. Recently Google has banned YouTube from all Amazon devices from 2018.
Next in line is their respective voice-controlled systems- Google Home and Amazon Echo, both coming with their own pros and cons. Amazon echo came much earlier to market while the google home is launched recently. Both are to be connected to phones first. Amazon Echo’s wake up word is ‘Alexa’ and for the google its ‘okay google’. Say the wakeup words ask them any question, write a checklist, order pizza, play music and much more. This definitely gives a rudimentary feeling of JARVIS!
The term “cloud computing” is everywhere. In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer’s hard drive. The cloud is just an alias for the Internet. Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular among small to mid-size businesses in the world because it enables your small business to use your business high-speed Internet connection to access many of the most popular business applications without the need for investment in computer hardware or software. We can see hardware vs cloud computing as telegram vs email. Fast, accessible from anywhere, no expenses on hardware and licenses.
Google Cloud Platform is there to compete with the supremo Amazon Web Services. Amazon AWS has quite an impressive number of companies on its side while Google Cloud is a beginner. Google keeps on acquiring cloud companies to take on the AWS. Both are rivals and on to each other neck. Google play music vs amazon prime music, for the e-book race, it’s google play books vs Amazon Kindle.
When a team at Google is interested in a startup, they typically go to the company’s corporate development arm and ask, “Can we buy this? “. In this way Google has acquired some 190 companies as of June 2016, the largest one being Motorola Mobility. On the other hand, Amazon has fewer acquisitions and investments in other businesses.
Google Play Store has marked its presence globally but Amazon also has come a long way to give a stiff competition. Once US-based, Amazon Play Store now has a footing in 200 countries and is seen a potential competitor of Google. Amazon Play store is not a third party app store for Android devices. However, as Google Play comes preinstalled on Android devices, Amazon Appstore has to be installed on its website. Google Play offers recommendations, has better play interface and is much bigger than the Amazon equivalent. Amazon is an interesting player right now. The company gets its revenue from retail, so it theoretically could provide free answers 24 hours a day, as long as there is an occasional purchase. Whereas, 90% of Google’s revenue stream comes from ads. Google has done a great job with maps but is struggling in disrupting itself with a general search.
The race to build the biggest empire has started, and both the companies are up for it. One thing is certain: Whoever wins will have to build the largest data library of the universe and provide services to prove their multipotentiality .
