Ask most people what they think of Apple Inc and the answers will be fairly consistent.  "Great products", "gorgeous design", "superb functionality", "reliable", "easy to use", "the good guys - not the evil empire" might all roll of the tongue.

Apple's turnaround from near oblivion in the mid 1990s to one of today's hottest brands is well documented. The iMac, iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad have all been welcomed rapturously by an adoring public and it seems that the company can do no wrong. The iPhone and iPad are the products of today's world - both portable devices enabling their users to immerse themselves and engage in a rich world of new mobile media.  Proving the point, the iPad's launch sales in the first few days this week have already exceeded 450,000 units and broken analysts expectations.

Apple's reputation amongst their customers has remained consistently high. But with the world at its feet, Apple has started to play a high-stake game that could put this hard won reputation at risk.

Apple has decided that as the world embraces its products as their media platform of choice, they want to control all access to the platform. Not content with recent hostile comments from Steve Jobs at long time ally Adobe calling the company 'lazy' and ridiculing Google's corporate philosophy, they now appear to have banished all flash and third party developers from the iPhone and in all likelihood the iPad too.  This latest move was done in an underhand manner with a change to the small print in the licensing terms and has prompted Lee Brimelow, Adobe's platform evangelist, in a well written post to exclaim "Apple - go screw yourself!" 

The initial reaction from on-line and social media has tended to back Adobe and their stance.  There are fears that Apple is getting too big for its boots and becoming as arrogant as Microsoft was in its heyday.  It reminds me of when Metrica worked with Netscape evaluating their international media coverage from the birth of the first mainstream browser in the mid 1990s and then throughout the ensuing browser wars. The parallels between Apple and Microsoft are clear and ominous.  Microsoft, coming late to the party, realised how the world was going to consume its media via the internet and wanted to control its access.  Apple is attempting to do something similar.

For a company that doesn't embrace social media, where Steve Jobs has no on-line presence, where the staff are also discouraged from engaging in online conversations and blogs, this is a dangerous game to play.  Apple's behaviour reminds me of closed and failed states like China, the Soviet Union and Iran attempting to do the same with their media channels. State controlled media has never succeeded, in today's world of social media it stands even less chance to succeed (think of the recent Iranian election and subsequent protests viral news coverage). 

Microsoft failed in its attempts to dominate access to the web.  Yes, at the time they damaged Netscape's share of the browser market, but Internet Explorer's gain was shortlived with more and more people now preferring other browsers.  Microsoft's behaviour was at enormous cost to the business both financially and to it's reputation, and for little end reward.  Apple deserves to fail in it's endeavours to control how we access and consume our media too.

There have been a number of interesting developments recently as search and social media continue to work closer with each other.

Microsoft's Bing, trying to steal a march on Google, recently launched a beta of BingTweets - a search engine that blends real time twitter results with Bing's web search too.  It's a very useful site.  

A search for example for PR Measurement will pull up Metrica in Bing's web search, but wont necessarily mention us in the Twitter feed.  Search for PR measurement jobs however and Metrica appears both in Bing's web page results, as well as the twitter feed showing the chatter around our search for a great sales exec (full job spec in case you're interested: Metrica sales exec role).  

Bing's approach blends a decent web search with the immediacy of a twitter search. Bringing the information together definitely beats having to do a manual search on both a web search engine and twitter.

The benefits of blending search and social networks are not lost on the major search engines. Traditional search is already starting to feel like yesterday's industry. More than ever people are looking to find relevant and up to date information from conversations that are happening now.  

As a result, all of the major search engines are looking for ways to encourage and engage on-line communities. Yahoo has recently redesigned it's homepage to embrace web 2.0 style personalised content. (Incidentally in another sign that the old world is changing, it has also recently become the last of the major players to announce that it will no longer be supporting the meta tag 'keyword' in its search results).

Google's not resting on its laurels either.  As Jeremiah Owyang explains, rather than trying to create their own social network portal (like Facebook or Myspace), Google is looking to envelope the social web with Google profiles, Gmail, Sidewiki (already covered on Metrica's Measurement Matters) and Wave. Instead of having their own URL, Google will be enabling every online activity to be a social one run through their own platform. That said, early reviews of Wave from it's intial beta users are that it's 'impressive but useless."

Back to Bingtweets, and some people have noticed that in the last 24 hours it has started to behave a little erratically from a stability point of view. This has coincided with Twitter also having issues which has suggested that behind the scenes, Bing and Twitter are about to sign a major search deal. This would make sense to Bing as it looks to make its search more relevant and 'real-time' and would make sense for Twitter too as it continues to look for ways to monetise without irritating its army of users with adverts. Watch this space.

Either way, it's just one more wake up call to the PR industry that it's time to embrace new challenges and techniques as social media continues to change the way public relations is planned, implemented and measured. 

Is it just me or is the power struggle between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, et al starting to look a bit like an adolescent squabble?!  

I mean, the latest development of Yahoo joining the OpenSocial Foundation is somewhat comparable to the sudden swapping of friendship allegiances amongst teenagers! Although to be fair, given the move creates a fundamental conflict in direction and strategy, as well as philosophy, between Yahoo and Microsoft it has perhaps been rather more intelligently motivated… 

Lets look at the facts here: 

1.)     Hostile takeover bid for Yahoo by Microsoft

2.)     Google a key player in OpenSocial and a key competitor of Microsoft

3.)     OpenSocial’s aims a red flag to Microsoft strategy - the aim of OpenSocial is to develop standards that can be used across all social networking sites, making it easier for software developers to write applications

4.)     Yahoo joining OpenSocial pretty much equitable to an alliance with Google

5.)     Only Facebook (in which Microsoft has invested $240million) and Windows Live Spaces remain missing from OpenSocial membership 

These facts aside, it still looks a bit like Yahoo sticking two fingers up to iron fisted Microsoft! 

As Yahoo Vice President of Platforms, Wade Chambers, said, "Openness is in the Internet's DNA and it's also a major aspect of our culture here at Yahoo." 

Ooooh, what you going to do next Microsoft?!