Apple Maps, China -- and the Art of War - Forbes

When facing a powerful opponent on a field of combat Sun Tzu advises, in the  Art of War, to attack the weakest points. This is what Apple has done to Google by choosing China as the best venue in its challenge to Google Maps.

While Apple is having to apologize for the poor quality of its maps in the West, it is clearly superior to Google Maps in China. Others observe that local services have better maps than Apple in China, but that is not the key point. Apple's enemy is Google, and they have attacked their rival at its weakest point.

Google and Apple are the world's two best-positioned tech companies. They circle and jostle in many ways. It is like the ancient Asian game of Go, a subtle strategic game whose objective is to surround an opponent who is trying to do the same to you.

Google maps have sparse data in China, in part because it has a strained relationship with the Chinese government, which maintains a heavy hand on most things in the world's largest country.

Google may have made some bad business decisions for good moral reasons. In 2010, objecting to the Chinese government's online censorship and surveillance policies, Google moved out of Beijing to Hong Kong telling Chinese users to visit them there. China just blocked them and Google equivocated, then returned to China where its relationship with the authorities remains strained on many levels.

Apple has fared better. It abides by government policies and it provides what China wants most from foreign business entities: new jobs and modern technologies.

Like all Asian countries, mobile technologies have dominated over personal computers in both personal and business life. According to mobiThinking, a free mobile marketing resource, China is the world's largest and fastest growing mobile phone market. By February 2012, there were one billion mobile phones in China, up from 500 million five years earlier.

So far, only 3.2 percent of those are smartphones, but consider the billion-user base. That 3.2% of China's cellphone market represents 22 percent of the world's smartphone sales in 2011. Of course the number of users and the percent of market is growing faster than anywhere else.

Partly because many Chinese are just getting their first cars there has been little demand for map apps, but that is likely to change with the same blinding speed so much else in China has experienced .

While this was a brilliant move on Apple's part from my perspective, it is but an opening foray against a larger and better equipped enemy in the mapping arena. To have good maps you need lots and lots of user-generated data.

Google has been producing maps for seven years. They have 7000 employees working on their maps, gathering data on their own and incorporating data from users worldwide. It will be a long time before Apple can overcome Google's lead, but it has charted the shortest route in a global battle.

How important are maps to these two companies? From my perspective maps are of fundamental significance to both companies moving forward, much as it is to the next technological age.