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Sigh. Yet another gem from Business Insider. Let me explain:Like all companies, Apple needs to grow. It adds devices, software, subscriptions, and content that bring in new customers, lock them in, and sell them more.Sometimes these projects compete with other vendors:Maps (Google, Garmin)iBooks (Kindle, Nook)iTunes (Netflix, Spotify, Pandora)Numbers, Keynote (Microsoft)Siri search (Google, Bing)GameCenter (OpenFeint)This is called "competition." Over time it leads to fluctuations in market share and growth rates between a set of large vendors. Sometimes very small competitors are indeed killed.And, since Apple is so large and innovates so quickly, it gets into other markets at a faster rate than most companies.But that doesn't make a very interesting story. A blogger given 20 minutes to write an unpaid piece for a content farm needs to generate controversy and clicks. So they rely on the following playbook:Positioning competing products as killers. A story that reports, "Google to grow by only $9.9B in new revenue next year instead of $10B due to new Maps competition" is not very interesting. But reporting "Apple to kill Google" gets the clicks. The very idea that you could kill a $50B revenue company because of one announcement is ludicrous.Personalizing the competition. "Apple to enter mapping market" is way less interesting than "Steve Jobs thinks that Larry Page is a weenie and is shipping products to spite him." The press loves to suggest that personal grudges are the main driver behind billions of R&D spending. Soap operas are interesting. Somewhere in journalism school they teach, "write about people, not ideas." This leads to lots of bad journalism.Suggesting that decisions are competitor-focused and not customer-focused. "Apple hates Google and want to kill it" gets more clicks than, "Apple adds a bunch of incremental features to make its products slightly better."Yes, Apple will compete with Google more and more, but:It may mute Google's growth, but it won't kill it.It will compete because it is the best strategy, not because Steve hates Larry. (Anyway, Steve is gone).Apple will compete because it is going after Google's markets, not because it is going after Google.Apple in particular is one of the three companies (along with Facebook and Amazon) that is the most disciplined about taking a customer-centric approach in adding new capabilities. It gradually grows and expands into adjacencies like bacteria invading a petri dish. It rarely makes a random jump into a disconnected market just to chase a shiny new trinket (I'm looking at you, Microsoft, and your Bing, MSN, and Zune debacles). It rarely goes into markets that it can't succeed in and that won't benefit its customers.But, "Apple makes a set of incremental, logical, and adjacent moves" doesn't get the clicks. Pulling out at least one of these three click-generating tricks does.And of course, this being Business Insider, they pulled out all three.Update: here is another one. http://www.businessinsider.com/google-to-launch-its-amazon-killer-cloud-next-week-2012-6

The recommendation engine was an optimization feature -- how do I get existing customers to buy more stuff. New customers did not go to Amazon b/c they wanted a better product recommendation engine. They came to Amazon for the convenience and broad product coverage.Far more important then the recommendation engine are the user reviews. This is an incredible asset that is very hard to replicate for any new entrant. Because of their extensive reviews, for most product queries I do my default search engine has become Amazon -- this obviously is a risk to Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

In short: put yourself out there with networking, marketing, and advertising.Do some networking at conferences, the chamber of commerce, and your local small business association.Put up a well crafted website and continue to optimize it for SEO and conversation rate over time.Advertise on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.I've found that once you can hook that first big/name-brand customer and do a good job, new customers become easier to acquire.