Siri Politely Answers iPhone Users Questions

James Benham barks orders into his new iPhone4s for the location of a nearby restaurant and a reminder to call his wife when he leaves his office.   More than thirty times a day an obedient assistant named Siri serves up answers to Benham.

Siri’s feminine voice eerily sounds like what I imagine to be the sister of HAL 9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick.

Benham and I met for the first time over lunch as we prepared to discuss the creative process and entrepreneurship with students of Professor Rodney Hill at Texas A&M University in College Station. Apple’s new voice command search application called Siri turned our conversation to disintermediation—a central question for start-up business ventures. Will your product or service cut out the middle man? In this case Google search.

Entrepreneurship is literally in the Benham family DNA. They never worked for the “man”, preferring to start their own businesses. Benham holds the distinction of belonging to the prestigious Aggie 100 which recognizes new fast growing businesses owned or led by Texas A&M’s former students.

He bootstrapped JBKnowledge, a ten-year-old software development company that is kicking the butt of competitors heavily funded by venture capital dollars in the construction and real estate industry.

Benham believes Siri will disintermediate traditional search engine marketing because people will prefer to ask a question of their ever attached-at-the hip smart phones instead using a browser to type their query into a search box.

Benham suspects that Siri will utilize Apple’s own apps for the source of its search data and that Google apps like Maps will quickly vanish from Apple’s browser based platforms.

Will Siri Wave Her Magic Wand And Poof Google Apps Disappear From All Apple Platforms?

Shortly after our discussion at Texas A&M, the Cult of Mac published an article by Mike Elgan that describes the potential for disintermediation as Apple’s thermonuclear first strike against superpower rival Google.

A week later, technology journalist Leo Laporte of TWiT.tv delivered the news with shock and awe to hundreds of search engine marketing practitioners from across the globe at PubCon in Las Vegas.

Laporte’s opening keynote jolted the crowd by delivering a eulogy for Google search as well as for careers in search engine marketing. “My analysis is Google is in deep trouble right now. And if I were in your business, I would really be looking at alternatives to search engine marketing and search engine optimization.”

Predator Drone at Indian Springs AFB, Nevada

As I watched the audience grow agitated, I recalled doing a story at the nearby Nellis Air Force Base where ground based crews guide drones by remote control toward targets in Afghanistan.  It was as if an errant missile named Laporte had taken aim at PubCon’s hall.

At a PubCon party that night, I overheard revelers using Siri to summon plenty of search results for “escorts”, but that’s a story that stays in Vegas.

The next day, Google executive Matt Cutts took to the PubCon stage to try to bolster morale with reassurances about the future of Google search.  The crowd left feeling much brighter about its future.

However, as a 27-year veteran of the of old media (television news broadcasting), I experienced disintermediation first hand. The Internet disemboweled the old media’s business model teaching us that no one should become complacent about their craft.

My friends in the search engine marketing world should heed HAL’s greeting to Dave when he returned to the ship to find the crew dead, “I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.”