Google is facing a lot of threats to its future relevancy lately. First, Apple claims to have “not yet approved” its Google Voice app which allows cheap international or free calls to Canada, free SMS texting, and phone intelligence. Secondly, Google’s competitor, Yahoo, partners with Microsoft to use their Bing search engine. Thirdly, Facebook is still growing and becoming a social desktop with rumored micro payments and online check out in the works.

Successful technology companies are the ones that control the platform. The platform allows 3rd parties to extend features by using the APIs. An example is the widely successful iTunes App Store. This allows the company controlling the platform to grow exponentially with scale and thus profit with others effort. This is another reason why Google wants to be the operating system for both mobile phones (Android), laptop computers (Chrome OS), and browser (Chrome browser).

Google’s core business is search and advertising. What do you do, however, when the ISP serving the user injects their own ads instead of defaulting to your engine? Well, most recently, I noticed this when searching using Safari but instead of the usual Google Search page, I get Comcast with Yahoo results!

Is this a threat to Google? Absolutely! Is this legal? Not sure. But by the time this matter goes through the courts. Google may have lost so much revenue that it doesn’t matter if Google wins by law. Remember the fate of Netscape browser after Microsoft included their own browser in their Windows releases? Microsoft got fined a huge amount. However, by the time it was over, Netscape was gone (well, actually sold to AOL) but is no longer relevent.