Apple has much to prove as spotlight falls on services In any discussion of Apple these days, talk turns inevitably to hardware and software: specifically, how can Apple prevent an inexorable erosion of profit margins on the iPhone? And can design supremo Sir Jonathan Ive work his magic on iOS software to make it as much a joy to use as his sleek devices? All of which begs what has become an overriding question for Apple as the basis of competition in the mobile world has shifted: What about the services? As Android handset makers in general - and Samsung in particular - have progressed, differentiation in hardware and operating system has become increasingly difficult to sustain. That has made content and services the key, with customers coming to focus more on what their devices can do for them than what they look like or how easy they are to use. But as we asked in this column two years ago: Does Apple have what it takes to compete head-on with Google in services? Since then, the answer has been underwhelming. The iCloud, Steve Jobs" last big launch, sought to glue the company's devices together by making a user's personal content show up automatically on all of their Apple gadgets. It was a nice idea, though it was restricted to the Apple universe of gadgets and has had mixed reviews from developers and users over its reliability and ease of use. The Maps service, which came a year later, was a fiasco. As chief executive Tim Cook admitted earlier this week at the D11 conference in southern California, the flaws in Apple Maps have still not all been fixed and Apple has had to put some of its best minds on the problem to sort it out. But it will take much deeper changes in Apple's culture and processes to fix the underlying weaknesses in services. If Apple needed a wake-up call on services, it came at Google's annual developer conference earlier this month. Under new chief executive Larry Page, the search company has concentrated its considerable development effort behind a handful of its biggest services, with search and maps among the most important. The era of letting a thousand flowers bloom is officially over. The result, on full display at the developer event, has been a re-energised Google. Three of the search company's advances in particular should give Apple pause. One was the announcement of a subscription music service to match Spotify. Apple may have been the first to turn digital music into a paying proposition, and iTunes still dominates the market. But all the growth has shifted to the subscriptions business, where Apple has yet to show its hand. A long-overdue overhaul of iTunes at the end of last year could not disguise the fact that it has fallen badly behind. Even if Google's own subscription service fails to take off, the fact that it beat Apple to the punch in music, which has always been one of the "killer apps" of the iPhone, looked highly symbolic. A second warning came in Maps. Not content to sit on its lead in this area, Google has ripped up its old interface and rethought how users interact with its maps. That has also meant creating new ways to bring more of their own content on to the maps, something that should make them even more useful. The third area in which Google is racing ahead is in voice search. Apple's Siri may have caught the public imagination with its promise of letting users converse with an intelligent device, but its uses have been limited and it has remained more gimmick than world changer. Google's own voice-recognition technology has been advancing apace, though it has not had the same highly public profile as Siri. That is about to change. With the scheduled public launch of the voice-activated Google Glass next year - and, as demonstrated this month, the ability to wake up the search engine on any computer with the simple command "OK Google" - it may finally be discovering how to incorporate voice search into everyday life. Can Apple, already far behind in developing its own services, respond? Its best hope lies in extending the sort of deep ties it already has with services like Facebook and Twitter to other services. Mr Cook hinted this week that he will open up the Apple platform further to encourage more companies to build their services deeper into its platform. Apple's own developer conference starts in San Francisco on June 10. Mr Cook and Eddy Cue, who took charge of all of Apple's services in a management shake-up last year, will have a lot to prove.