Analyst: Apple Could Kill Off Google And Facebook With App Internet

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Google’s new Chromebook? We called it the MacBook Welfare, but Forrester CEO George Colony has another term for it: “corporate idiocy.” Why? Because with iOS, Apple saw the future of computing, and that future’s not the web… it’s the app.

According to Colony, Google’s problem is simple: all facets of its business save Android are built upon the idea of a web-based internet, mostly as a way of serving up ads.

Apple’s changed that game, though. We’re no longer living solely in a web internet. Rather, we’re living in the App Internet. That, according to Colony, is the “architecture of the future.”

Forrester says that because we increasingly connect to the Internet through specialist apps as opposed to through our browser. Chromebook is different: it’s “programs” and “apps” are really just web pages driven by standard HTML5 and CSS3 technology.

Colony says something like the Chromebook just can’t compete with devices like the iPhone or iPad that can access the App Internet… despite the fact that Google’s Android arm is already sinuously curled around the app.

Google’s Chromebook is just the most obvious and current example of Apple competitors who don’t get it. PC Vendors either need to embrace the App Internet, as Apple has done with its iOS and Mac App Stores, or perish.

Google’s not the only company that needs to evolve to embrace apps, or risk giving it all up. Colony says social networking giant Facebook is another company that doesn’t “get” the app, as evidenced by its failure to supply a native Facebook iPad app. That makes Facebook vulnerable to competitors, according to Forester: a social networking rival launching with strong, native apps for multiple ecosystems could quickly gain momentum that Facebook wouldn’t like them to have.

With Google still struggling within the company to release their own Facebook-killing social network, rumored to be called Google Me, it all comes down to this: will Google Me be a social network for the App Internet, or will it be another Chromebook? If the latter, Facebook has nothing to fear, but if Google can embrace the app beyond Android, they might just be a credible threat.

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