Comment Old narrative Google Wallet is a failure (Score 1) 631
.. new narrative: Those evil retailers hate Apple and the credit card companies.
I always found it amusing that articles used to say that Google didn't know what it is doing with NFC or that NFC is lame. Some articles stated that NFC isn't good enough for Apple, but if Apple did NFC they'd win. The problem is that those articles focused on the technology and not the true gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are the credit card companies and the retailers. A person can't use NFC if there are no NFC terminals. There are few NFC terminals because there is not reason to have them. Some companies that issued NFC plastic stopped doing so because there just wasn't demand.
Now we have a liability shift deadline fast approaching. Terminals must support EMV. It's not surprising that many EMV terminals also support NFC. But who made that happen? The liability shift. Not Apple. Not Google.
So now we have a perfect storm. We have a company that is great at marketing their new NFC tech. People finally become aware of NFC around the time that banks are reissuing their cards with chips in them. We have a way for phones to easily participate in EMV transactions wirelessly. We also have a consortium of companies about to launch a mobile payment system. Who has the most power in this? They are going to shut that interface door and be the gatekeepers for mobile payments. Then they can focus on the real war. Not a war between Apple and Google, but a war between retailers and the credit card companies.
There are still ways to get around this and have "mobile payments" tied to your phone that will work anywhere. Someone needs to make EMV adapters for phones. Or maybe "Plastc" will go big. But either one of those things is too high a bar for most people. They'd rather just pull the plastic out of their pocket.