5 Reasons Why Google Valuation Equal To Apple Is Not Justified

Apple stands as the innovation-driven company, which faced the failure in the PC market share against Microsoft. Though Apple has made a strong come back with iPod and iPhone, people fear that it will repeat the same mistake as it did with its MAC OS X. Recent legal hassle of Apple with Mac Clone provider Pystar proves that Apple is still adamant over licensing its products. Therefore, despite Apple’s huge market potential, it is not ready to dilute its brand value and chase the dream of leading the market.

Apple may have enjoyed its leadership in music industry with its iTunes and iPods but the situation is changing with record labels venturing for different portals to sell music. Google has already tied up with music content providers, Lala and iLike, to cater to the music industry. Further, it has already announced its paid content in YouTube which will directly affect the sales in iTunes. YouTube, which has around billions views per day, has a higher potential of selling records and TV serials then iTunes. Further, with the movement of Google from free to paid service, which is a more stable business plan than online ads, will automatically show up in its share price.

Currently, the computing industry is moving from PC to mobile, which have recorded 308.9 million units of sales of smart phones. Presently, Apple is leading with its iPhone but the market is already seeing a struggle between Google’s OS based phone Droid (Motorola) competing with iPhone. Droid has already recorded sales of around 100,000 phones over first weekend. Not to mention the brand failure Apple is facing due to its tie up with AT&T, which has found itself in a legal fight with Verizon over an advertisement. In addition, the presence of Black Berry and its enterprise solution will always pull back the sales of iPhone to more premium users. In order to increase its market shares, Apple needs to seriously invest over enterprise solutions which will immediately affect its budget and resources. On the other hand, Google with its tremendous investment over data centers, and R&D has no problem with scalability.

One of the major mobile applications of Google called Google Voice is the latest technology to challenge the Telecom industry. But the rejection of the application by Apple did not prove fruitful for the company because Google Voice is already becoming a major player over the management of voice communication. With its reach increasing, it is soon to become the main medium of communication.

The potential of cloud computing has already inspired Google to exhibit features like enhanced Google maps, which shows you the direction of a place, in its Android based mobile. Apple may have attracted many developers to built apps for iPhone but continuous restriction and censorship of Apple is harming the developer community. We are already seeing the movement towards the Android which is strongly tied up with Free Open Source Software (one of the largest community of developers spread over the world). With such strong backing of the community, it would be unwise to compare Apple’s valuation to that of Google.
In terms of brand value, Google is equally as strong as Apple. In the line of innovations, there is no other company as aggressive as Google. Even though Google and Apple believe in simplicity and value addition to user’s experience, that’s where the similarity ends. The technology is moving from PC to mobile and from desktop to cloud. In order to experience this change you have to look into the trends being followed by the content provider.
Everything is surrounded by user experience, and no other industry is as huge as entertainment and content generation. On the forefront of content come books, music and videos. It is no doubt that these contents are moving towards cloud and when it comes to cloud, Google is the king. Apple on the other hand doesn’t have enough experience and knowledge to compete in the web space. With technology like Chrome OS only due to release within a year along with its supporting hardware, we can only speculate the possibilities.
Apple is a great company which is governed by values and vision to cater society with great innovative products. There can be no doubt over the sincerity of Apple. Apple is a cultural phenomenon which has affected each of us. But with the changing time, the needs and behavior of people are changing. The new age is moving towards the web technology and unlike Apple, Google has larger market share. Hence, it would be too early to quantify the valuation of Google and Apple as being similar.