Meet the Google iPad

    To connect us to all this, Google needs two things: First, it needs rivers more data; it needs us to annotate our world with information. The more we use our phones — of whatever brand — to leave reviews and photos and tell the web where we’ve gone, the more the web knows about those places. Second, Google needs to know more about us — it needs more signals such as location, usage history, and social networks — so it can make its services, and ads, more relevant to us.

    Today, Apple may be providing the device that connects us to this almost omnipresent web of knowledge, but it’s still Google that has organized that web and still Google that best monetizes it. Google may compete with Apple in devices, operating systems, and app marketplaces, but that is a sideshow. For Google’s bottom-line business model is dead simple: The more we use the Internet, the better Google becomes. Apple is only helping us use it more. So in this battle, it doesn’t matter who wins. Google wins.